"Big Kid" painting done during role play.

Every year for a week, Brush Fire partners with a private high school and an elementary school that serves students from mostly low-income, immigrant families. This program, in its third year, never ceases to inspire me.

Prior to meeting the elementary school students, I train the high school kids in the Brush Fire Method. The corner stone of the method, encouraging process over product, is not well received by the high school students. In a way, this is understandable. Lick-Wilmerding High School is quite competitive and many of the students have been groomed for Ivey League institutions all their lives. The value of doing a painting ­ or anything ­ without regard for the result is foreign to most of them.

So we do roll plays, each of them taking turns painting and mentoring to see how it feels to encourage with probing questions rather than praise or criticism. Of course, knowing how to phrase a well-timed question takes longer to master than a single afternoon, but I give them as solid a base as I can in the time we have.

"Little Kid" painting done during class.

Before we know it, we are at the Tenderloin Community School, where each of the high school students is paired with one or two kids in each of three classes and the game is on! I give each class their prompts and circulate around the room, encouraging and guiding the “big kids” as they get to know the “little kids.” I am amazed by how quickly the little kids connect to their high school mentors and how the high school students quickly understand that the unconditional nature of the painting process allows for this profound bond to form.

It’s not all smooth sailing, and we use the end of our day to sort out problems and share our joys. As the week progresses, the joys are bigger, the problems are less important and everyone is deep in creative process. We don’t explicitly set out to teach the older youth about the less privileged existence of the younger ones, but I know the difference in life style comes up, and I can only guess what effect it has. It seems as if the potential for multi-layered learning on all sides is being realized by everyone, with creative process as the point of connection.