Teach and Transform

Retired Educators Anita and Mike Brisco Created a Legacy of Innovation
By Ellen Orr

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight, Mike and Anita helped their students built a quarter-scale model of the Wright Flyer. (Submitted photo)

In our culture, people are regularly pigeonholed as specific types of learners: left- or right-brained, techy or old-school, into the arts or into the sciences. For over 40 years, extraordinary retired educators Anita and Mike Brisco taught Arkansas students that real life is not so easily categorized. At the vivid intersection of art and science, the Briscos fostered transformation—of raw materials, of students, and of the entire district’s arts and science programs.

Anita and Mike met while studying at Texarkana College. They married on Friday, August 21st, 1970, and then enrolled in teachers’ college at Henderson State University the following Monday. Two years later, they each entered the classroom—Anita as an elementary teacher, Mike as a middle school art teacher. They spent one year working in Foreman, Arkansas, before jobs opened up within the Texarkana Arkansas School District.

(photo by shane darby)

Mike worked for 27 years as the art and photography teacher at North Heights Junior High before he pseudo-retired.

“When he retired, I still had a year to go [before being eligible for retirement myself],” Anita explained.

“So,” Mike continued, “I went up there and volunteered every day and was her private aide for the whole year. We had a ball with those kids. She was teaching science [at Kilpatrick Elementary] at the time. We went through two entire science books and did every hands-on type thing you could possibly think of.”

After their year of co-teaching, Mike joked with the Kilpatrick principal that the only way they would continue working would be if they could work together in the hands-on science and computer lab.

“And before I could say I was kidding, they’d hired us,” he said.

The Briscos taught side-by-side, technically as paraprofessionals, for another 14 years.

“With two teachers in one classroom who [came to accrue] a total of 80-something years of experience—there were no problems,” Mike said. “We kept the kids busy the entire time. Our biggest problem was getting them out of the room for the next group.”

Over the 42 years the Briscos spent teaching, they facilitated countless projects for their students—kites, rockets, all sorts of experiments. In 2003, to commemorate the centennial of the Wright brothers’ first flight, Mike and Anita’s students built a quarter-scale model of the Wright Flyer. Mike recalled a project in which his students assembled a life-sized dinosaur model, which was as tall as the school building itself. The art students painted Mike’s art room every year—a color wheel on the front wall, op art on the ceiling tiles, et cetera. They got their hands dirty, literally: “When they made pottery, they dug the clay from the creek,” Anita recalled. Mike and Anita built an outdoor classroom at Kilpatrick, using funds from the PTA and Arkansas Game and Fish. 

Though many long-time educators are resistant to incorporating new technology in their classrooms, the Briscos worked on the cutting edge of computer science. With colleague Bill Dempsey—to whom Anita and Mike both give immense credit—they dove head-first into using computers in the classroom; in fact, in 1989, Mike was named the Arkansas IBM Teacher of the Year for the innovative ways he used Amiga computers in his art classes. 

When Mike and his students began making and using pinhole cameras, Anita knew her elementary students would benefit from such a practical science lesson—so Mike’s students built a portable dark room, and they toured area schools with the cameras and dark room, letting the young students take their very own pinhole photos.

At some point in the late ‘80s, North Heights acquired a video camera, and Bill Dempsey had an idea: “He said, ‘If you can get ahold of an old VCR, three color filters, and a clear filter, we can figure out how to do digital photography.’ So I said okay and got all that stuff together,” Mike recalled. Together, they created digital photographs, before anyone else in the region. Not only that, but they were teaching students how to do it.

Once Mike’s art students got the hang of the somewhat-tricky process, they used digital photography as a tool for their art: they would photograph their work and then mock up various additions and alterations on the computer.

The school’s acquisition of the video camera was huge for the students, but it was arguably even more influential on the Briscos. As they were figuring out how it worked, one of their first videography subjects was a butterfly, and then another, and then another.

“We didn’t know anything about butterflies, so then we started buying a bunch of books about butterflies, to learn about what we were videoing,” explained Anita. The more they learned, the more they wanted to learn. One might say the couple became butterfly obsessed. 

They got involved with Monarch Watch, an organization that studies monarch migration; to this day, Anita and Mike capture, tag, and release monarchs every year. They worked with the Arkansas Game and Fish to create educational signage at butterfly hot spots, as well as an educational video about monarch-tagging.

Anita and Mike volunteer with Monarch Watch, tagging butterflies in the fall and spring. (submitted photo)

This love of butterflies of course manifested in the classroom as well. The Briscos’ students at Kilpatrick studied monarchs all year. Beginning in the fall, the kids cultivated a monarch sanctuary at the school, gathered eggs and larva to study, and observed the tiny specimens under microscopes. “The students one year photographed an egg every day until it hatched and then took pictures of the larva until it was too big for the microscope,” Anita and Mike wrote for the Journey North (a butterfly migration organization affiliated with the University of Wisconsin) website. “We then moved to a video camera, set up on a tripod, and recorded the caterpillar until it made its chrysalis. We watched closely until the chrysalis was dark and then recorded on time lapse until it emerged, stretched its wings, and was ready to fly away.”

The Briscos’ students even participated in NASA’s 2009 butterfly project, in which monarchs were grown at the International Space Station. Over 170,000 students across the U.S. contributed to the experiment by raising their own monarchs on Earth, with approximately the same environmental controls as NASA, except for the issue of gravity.

Though they officially retired from teaching in 2015 (although they volunteered at various area schools until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic), Mike and Anita retained their passion for butterflies. At the time of this interview, the Briscos’ flower beds were full of plants intended to attract pollinators. In their kitchen was a microscope, trained on caterpillar eggs they had just found at a nearby park.

Mike not only photographs, studies, and tracks butterflies; he also creates art in their likeness. Most prolifically, he creates prints from hand-carved wood cuts.

(photo by shane darby)

“In college, you pay a whole bunch of money to buy special carving boards, but I just go down to the lumber company and buy wood,” he explained. “It’s really hard to carve in, but it doesn’t matter; I’ve got plenty of time. I usually work from one of my photographs, draw it, and then you carve out everything that you don’t want to have ink on it. Then you ink it up, and you put a piece of paper on top of it. Most people use a press, but we don’t have a press, so I take a drinking glass and rub on it just as hard as I can for about 15 minutes. It wears you out. And then you lift it up and you have the black and white print.”

Mike then adds pigment with colored pencils, photographs his work, and frames it in a black-matted pine frame, which he and his son, Chris, co-create for the series. The Brisco household contains stacks of butterfly prints, preserved and displayed in their identical, unfinished-pine frames. Mike estimated that he has crafted around 30 or so unique images in this fashion.

The Briscos have stacks of framed prints, and the collection is ever-growing. (photo by shane darby)

Chris and his wife, Nicole, carry their forebears’ legacy. Chris teaches career and technical education (CTE) courses at Arkansas High and is the coach of the robotics team. Across town, Nicole teaches art at Pleasant Grove.

Mike is currently working on another butterfly piece. (photo by shane darby)

Just as a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, retaining its DNA but gaining color and flight, Mike and Anita’s students developed curiosity, courage, and confidence, under the careful, passionate guidance of their teachers. Undoubtedly, generations of Texarkanans soar higher thanks to the Briscos’ decades of devotion.