PROJECT PHASES

From EnvironmenT
To Heart I

Background

The Dandelion School is located on the outskirts of Beijing in a heavily polluted, under-developed and high crime area. It serves the educational needs of five hundred and twenty students from migrant families who subsist on very low incomes. Occupying a former factory, the original Dandelion campus appeared inhospitable, barren and harsh.

The Dandelion Transformation Project worked to engage the entire school community of students, teachers and staff in a co-creative process to transform the school environment into a place of beauty and joy, a space that inspires learning, creativity and exploration.

BEFORE: Entrance to the original Dandelion Campus.

Environmental transformation

Providing design and implementation guidance, Lily Yeh worked with hundreds of students, teachers, volunteers and workers to complete the transformation of the school’s main campus with mural painting, mosaics, and environmental sculpture. Students participated in every phase and aspect of the project, from retrieving tiles from rubble, making mosaics, mixing cement, transporting bricks to roof tops, painting walls, windows, doors, and creating designs for future murals.

Dandelion students participate in art workshops at the original campus in 2010.

FIRST MAPPING PROJECT:
STORYTELLING THROUGH DEPICTING PERSONAL JOURNEYS

Dandelion School is composed of migrant children. They all come from somewhere else. There is a sense of being uprooted and a yearning for their home provinces among the students. The Dandelion School Transformation Project aimed to help students express their emotions about loved ones at home, their childhood, and homeland.

Expressing feelings and thoughts often helps to dispel the sense of alienation in a new environment. Healing takes place when their voices are heard and cherished.

We asked students to trace their footprints from their homeland to Dandelion School on a small map of China. Some students came directly to be with their parents while others took detours; they traveled by train, truck, and bus.

We asked them to depict what their homeland looks like. That unleashed some deep feelings with vivid and touching details. Zhang Ting, an eight grade student, created a colorful drawing showing her journey from her homeland in the earthquake region of Xichuan to Beijing. The drawing is accompanied by her writing, remembering her childhood.

My loving grandmother
The verdant greens in the springtime
As far as the eye can see
After rain, the land looked ever more enchanting and enticing.

Swimming in crystalline streams
Even the fish are smiling
Apple trees bent low with juicy fruits
Here in my childhood paradise
13 years I spent.

Then came the earthquake
The mountains broke open
Heavy rain of many days washed away soil and stones.

I came to Beijing to join my parents
Who have been working for years there to make ends meet.

They found me a new paradise, the Dandelion School, where we are encouraged to fly with our hopes and dreams.

Drawing by Zhang Ting.

Second MAPPING PROJECT:
MOVING FROM THE FRINGE TO THE CENTER

On a corridor wall of Dandelion School, there is a map of China showing its many provinces. The description beneath the map states that Dandelion’s community of 678 students and teachers came from twenty-five provinces. The numbers, though static, express the diversity of the school population. Lily Yeh felt that the power of diversity and potential resources of this migrant school community could manifest themselves through creating a new kind of map.

Based on students’ drawings, Fu Tao, the art teacher, created a very big map of China that contains the physical movement of every student in the class, some from neighboring provinces, some from far away places. One student came all the way from Xinjiang, the Uighur Muslim minority region in the Northwest. On the map, Dandelion School, a disenfranchised community, became a magnetic energy center that attracts people from all over China. Thus, a fringe place moves into the center.

Dandelion principal Zheng Hong.

“Under the Same Blue Sky
We Grow and Progress Together”
– Flyer for Dandelion Art Show
(July 2010)