New, student-inspired mural at Tucson school 'opens minds through arts'

A student-inspired mural was unveiled Tuesday at Collier Elementary School, a product of Tucson Unified School District’s Opening Minds through the Arts program.

Opening Minds through the Arts was developed at TUSD in-house. It focuses on serving students creatively, using elements of neuroscience and child development. Professional artists come to classrooms to integrate their specific mediums — including dance, visual arts and music — into the school’s lessons.

Part of the program’s purpose is to encourage students to reach beyond their comfort zones to achieve what regular methods might not have accomplished. It is a team effort between principals, arts integration specialists, classroom teachers and the artists.

“Arts integration is a part of their everyday learning,” said Wendy Joy, Collier’s art specialist for the program, known as OMA. “It’s not that you just add the arts on top, but the arts fulfills and rounds out their learning in math and social studies and science and language arts.”

The program is nationally recognized, having been featured in numerous publications. Opening Minds through the Arts has also received multiple awards from the Arizona governor’s office for arts in education.

Collier is recognized by the district as an OMA Gold school, meaning it offers arts instruction at least twice per week. An arts integration specialist also works with every student in the school.

Tucked away into a quiet area south of Sabino Canyon Recreation Area, Collier, at 3900 N. Bear Canyon Road, had about 135 students, grades preschool through fifth, at last count by the Arizona Department of Education.

The mural was a schoolwide endeavor and an example of what Joy does.

“I always have to tie it to things they’re learning about,” she said. “The students had a presentation on murals around the world and how murals tie into community and what they represent.”

The students then designed their own murals, which were used to inspire the local artist, Allison Miller’s, project.

Alexia Dora, a fifth grader at Collier, is the school’s student council president. She spoke at the mural’s unveiling. Before the big reveal, Dora told the Star how she felt about the project and having arts be a focal point within the school.

“Art is something that people sometimes use to relieve stress and something that people like to do for fun,” Dora said. Without the arts, Dora said, schools would have “no, like, fun colors and some of the exciting things that kids like to see that would make them happy.”

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She said the mural was a fun project the students got to do, using their imaginations. “We were taking parts of stuff and putting it all together with our imagination. We’ve been learning all together.”

Dora said the art is inspired by the desert, Arizona and Collier itself.

Watching the artist’s process was also a learning experience, Dora said. “It was cool because she was going very slow. She wasn’t rushing or anything. She was taking her time with the edges and the lining and the shading.”

Joy said part of the learning process is understanding art is not always about the end product.

“One of the things we stress in the OMA program is that art is not always for public display and it’s not always created for a finished project. Sometimes the process of creating is just as important.”

OMA projects like Collier’s mural are funded by Arizona tax credit dollars.

“(Tax credit) donations made this mural possible,” Joy said. “The tax credit money can go to the extra things that enrich even more, like bringing in the symphony and having a muralist.”

Integrating arts into lessons and the school community as a whole can make success for every student possible, Collier principal Lisa Langford said.

“When the students come to the OMA room, they can be successful, no matter what happened in math, or what happened in reading, they can come in here and be successful.”

It enriches their lives as well, Langford added.

“They actually have an artist that comes in and they’re not looking at it on a video. They’re not reading it in a book, they’re engaging with a real artist. Their lives are richer. They just may not know it yet.”