Teaching Artist Spotlight: Buckley Griffis
The series “Teaching Artist Spotlight” highlights the work that CCE Teaching Artists are doing through our afterschool programming and The Foundations School.
Buckley Griffis is moved by the healing power of the drum and the way that the drum circle brings people together. That power inspired him to become a teacher 25 years ago.
“I’ve always loved the drum,” Mr. Griffis said. “And in my early 20s, I started to really understand how the drum can be a tool for healing… For me, that’s actually the underlying intention of the work I do with kids.”
For more than a decade, Mr. Griffis has been a Teaching Artist with CCE, integrating academic subjects like science and reading into the rhythm of world percussion. That includes drums, but also instruments like shakers, bells, blocks, tambourines, and more.
“One of my favorite instruments is a drum called a Tar. It’s a thin, shelled drum and you play it with your hands, your fingers,” Mr. Griffis said. “I like to play it in a kind of Middle Eastern-style. But this kind of drum is played in every indigenous culture on earth. There’s something about the ratio of the diameter of the head to the depth of the shell, and it really has a very strong vibration. I love it.”
His Impact In The Classroom
Mr. Griffis is a Teaching Artist in CCE’s CADRE (Creative Arts Designed to Reinforce Education) afterschool program. In his classes, he ties the beat of percussion to the rhythm of language. When he does this, he says, he can explore almost any subject.
“I think my favorite is science,” Mr. Griffis said. “If I’m talking about something like the climate crisis… we would brainstorm a question and then there would be answers and we would play the rhythm of those answers.
“If we were talking about a predator-prey relationship,” he continued. “We would have kids choose certain characters, and they would pick an instrument, and they would try to play the feeling of a creature crawling low to the ground or someone running and trying to get something else, or we would be studying something like producers, consumers, and decomposers, and each student would get to pick one of those, and they would try to tell the story of how those different things interact in nature, by playing the instruments, and then the other kids would get to guess who is doing what part.”
The drum circle that Mr. Griffis introduces to the classroom has the power to teach. It also has the power to heal and transform. That’s what happened when Mr. Griffis encountered a child named Daniel.
“His mother brought him to the circle, and at the time, we were playing in a small room in one of the parks. And he didn’t come in,” Mr. Griffis said. “At the end of the first class, his mother explained to me that he really loves the sound of the drum, but he’s autistic and he couldn’t take it. It was too much for him.”
Daniel continued to listen to the drum circle from outside the building, but as the summer continued on, he made his way into the room.
“We did the program again the next summer and he came in and started in the room,” Mr. Griffis said. “By the end of the summer, he came in and started playing with us.”
Mr. Griffis continued to work with Daniel over the years. And ten years after that initial meeting, Daniel’s mother introduced Mr. Griffis to his therapist.
“His mother came up to me and said, ‘I just want to introduce you to his therapist because I’ve told her about what you’re doing with Daniel,” Mr. Griffis said. “And more than ten years ago, we couldn’t play music in the house because the sound was too much for him. And over time, he started to become more accepting and was able to play and listen to music. And now he’s like a regular teenager, and just has his headphones on and plays loud music in his room.’ It was a remarkable transformation of him playing and opening himself up to being able to tolerate the sound through the drum circle.”
The Power of Arts Education
As a Teaching Artist, Mr. Griffis has seen arts education in action for over a decade.
“It accesses a very different part of our brain,” he said. “There’s the analytical part that’s very good academically, but when you can start to connect that with the creative component of the brain and try to bring them together in the activities… it’s magical.”
“I’ve had students that are not very strong academically, and they come into the drum circle, and we start doing things with the instruments, and all of the sudden, they’re asking questions and coming in with stories about what they had learned at home and how they’re interested in these different things because they’ve been telling the stories with the instruments,” he continued. “That’s a connection that is, I think, hard to make without using some kind of art form.”
Mr. Griffis credits CCE for being able to showcase how arts integration can really make a difference in the lives of students.
“I think CCE is particularly good at understanding what is needed in education and finding out—not only how the arts can provide that and deliver it to the kids, but how we can demonstrate their successes,” Mr. Griffis said. “Because, a lot of people, I think, can intuitively feel ‘Well, I know that if we bring in theatre and music and drawing and painting, that’s gonna really help the kids.’ But CCE has been able to document how successful that bridge has been in the academic learning.”
Are you interested in becoming a Teaching Artist at CCE? Check out our application here.