Priorities as an Educator

During our fieldwork meeting on Wednesday we had a brief discussion on some things we had learned or been reminded about public schools through our Fieldwork III experiences. Many people were bringing up negative things. Negative things about administration, student standardized testing and the way they have been assigned to evaluate teachers, and students who struggle in school and do not get the support they need. Surely all of these things are important to be addressed. Often administration does not support the teachers they way they need it, therefore the state prescribes these mandated evaluation systems, all the while effecting the students and their success and learning. My point here is that everything that happens above ends up effecting each individual student.
Instead of making these issues our main concern, which is difficult to do as they have become the talk of New York state teachers, we should be making individual students our main concern. Something I was reminded of during my Fieldwork was something that I did not get a chance to bring up at our meeting. This is the importance of creating a comfortable and positive classroom environment. My mentor teacher had surely done this. Sure there were students who were chatty and occasionally slacked off but there was a certain respect that was apparent throughout each of her classes. She created an environment where she treated her students as responsible individuals and they respected her for that. She mentioned that although she has been working on dealing with these mandated testing requirements, she is still making her students her main priority. She has not let these things get in the way of how she is going to run her classroom. She eats her lunch in her room because there are students who come in to talk to her, to ask her for advice, and do some extracurricular art work. During her free periods there are always students in her room, asking if other students can come in, even if just to have a place to go to do homework for other classes. This atmosphere reminded me of why I decided to become an art teacher in the first place. I was reminded that in high school the art room was the place I used to go to when I had that free time and needed that comfortable space.
So when reflecting on our conversation in our fieldwork meeting and all of the negative things said, I wanted to shed some positive light on what can happen in public schools. Creating an atmosphere in which your students can learn and feel comfortable doing so should be your main priority. Not to say that you should not deal with other things such as your administration and state mandated things, because you are going to have to, but you should consider where it all steams down to. The bottom line is, it really is for the students, so your priority should begin with them. Maybe then those students who struggle in school will get the support that they need. Just a thought. 

Memory, Animation Making, and Art Education

As part of the Honors Program it is required that you do a thesis project that relates your perspective major. I have been aware of this for some time and am drawing towards the end of this process; hopefully completing it before I start student teaching. When deciding what exactly I was going to do for this project, as being an art major I have more liberties than those who are succumbed to writing a twenty page paper, I reflected on my work throughout my college career. One particular project that I learned the most from was my stop-motion animation project I did in my freshman year Drawing II class. This project was intensive in documenting process, researching, and investing time in a specific thematic focus. So, what if I created another stop-motion animation? This time is would be on my terms. It would be on a theme I was particularly interested in. And I would then reflect on how I could use this in my practice as a teacher.
Currently I am a weekend away from completing the animation which I have been working on since the beginning of this summer. Developing a theme for this animation came when I was working in my thematic drawing class last semester. For a "Cabinet of Curiosities" project I chose to explore memories of not only myself but various people in my life and take specific imagery from the memories they described. In thinking about this I began to collect symbols from my own life and memory. What were reoccurring images?  How could I develop these images into an animation?
I researched memory. What were the processes? How does it work? I learned about storage, encoding, and recall. I developed an understanding of how memory works in layers, of how things enter the memory one way but can come out skewed. How could I consider this in my making? How could I use layering?
I layered text from letters, song lyrics, and quotes from books down on the paper. I drew on top of it. I photographed. I picked specific imagery from memories, certain symbols that spring up strong memory for me and that have stuck with me from early childhood to more recent occurrences. I did a number of scenes. I wrote about those scenes, why those symbols? Why that text? I brought the images into photoshop and layered them, sped them up, slowed them down, and created breaks between them. I developed my animation.
Now how does this relate to teaching? How as a practicing artist can we allow that work to influence our teaching? If I was going to create a curriculum based off of this practice what would be important? Memory? Process? Documentation? Photoshop? What do I want my students to learn.
By this thinking and researching through art education literature I have developed an idea of what is important in being a teaching artist. Allowing your practice to integrate into your classroom can make a stronger connection between yourself, the curriculum you are creating, and your students.
Below are some stills from my animation.

Thoughts on Book Transformation Lesson

We had a short week of lessons this week due to the break but I would have to say this was one of the most interesting ones that we have had thus far in class. Laura and Mikaela, based on their theme of "transformation," did a lesson on book sculptures. In my own art work I have been working with a lot of text elements, ripping out pages of books, and even transforming a book into a painting. Needless to say I was very much engaged with the lesson. It was not only my background with this that had me interested but the way it was presented. Both teachers samples were extremely compelling, definitely hooking us into the "I want to do that." With this lesson they also hit on a lot of key learning ideas. By having us find "context clues" in order to base our sculpture off of we went over different ways to search through literature for something. By using these clues as subject matter for what we were creating it became more meaningful. What was also interesting about the way they presented it was the fact that we were able to only use what was interesting to us about the literature we were working with. It was even commented on by one of the teachers that you could even base your sculpture off of one line in the text. Something also fascinating about the lesson in general is really the medium of book sculpture. I have seen book sculpture before but exploring it first hand was genuinely interesting. By taking a material that traditional used in one particular way and changing it into a piece of three dimensional artwork definitely became not only engaging but challenging in a good way.

There were only a few issues that the lesson presented. I had mentioned this in the feedback session but as far as the context clues go I thought it would be useful to have a worksheet with questions to prompt students to find specific things. This way they can choose to base their sculpture off of these things or not but that way the teacher would have documentation of them picking out specific "context clues." For our purposes in class it was fine to sort of just assume the student had scanned the literature and picked out something specific but I think in a high school setting the teacher would want to physically see the brainstorming that the student went through.

In general I thought this lesson was very innovative and delivered very well. After it was over Aaron made a comment about how the class was still working on their sculptures during feedback time. This is a level of engagement that we should be challenging ourselves to get from our students. As teachers I think that this should be a priority. Although you may not get every student with every lesson we should be finding ways for students to create meaning for themselves through artworks, therefore being more than just interested in what they are making.

Below is my book sculpture based off of "Pheonix Rising." I was definitely still playing with this even after the class time was over.

Reflection on Some Classmate Lessons

After writing about my lesson I was reflecting on a few of the lessons my classmates have presented thus far. There have been a variety of topics, media, and teaching strategies explored. In all of the lessons we have experienced there is a good amount of student involvement, connections to contemporary artists, and interesting discussion. Two lessons that really interested me were Sara and Shannon's lesson on environment and Leah, Cameron, and Chris' lesson on apocalypse.

Through photography and the use of found object, Shannon and Sara developed a unique way for students to think about their chosen environments. By exploring objects found in particular environments, there is a comment made on the environment itself. Shannon and Sara had each of us bring in a minimum of five items from a particular environment. At least one of the items has to be fabricated and one natural. This put an emphasis on the juxtaposition of these two different types of items and did spring up an interesting conversation on what would be considered natural and what would be considered fabricated. We also discussed composition, what would make a dynamic composition or a static composition. Students were able to come up to the Smart Board and draw types of lines to experiment with these two ideas. Although Sara and Shannon's presentation may have seemed a bit long they did cover a huge amount of information and vocabulary that was useful in the photographic process. As a participant in the art making process it became really interesting to play around arranging the objects, setting up various compositions. I became thinking about which objects were most important in representing the environment, what looked better in the way of color, shape and form. It was interesting to think of a particular environment in terms of found object and the lesson was definitely an interesting way to think about composition.

Leah, Cameron, and Chris' lesson on apocalypse was an interesting way to combine collaboration along with individualized art making. Being the first group to go they were presented with a bit of pressure but definitely preformed well under it. Although there presentation wasn't as vocabulary heavy as Sara and Shannon's they did a nice job with presenting a variety of art work and developing the meaning of the term apocalypse for the class. We were each prompted to sketch four of a specific body part that would then be used by the entire group in constructing of their own apocalyptic monster. By combining these various body parts we drew out what our monsters would look like when we made them out of clay later. Something that was successful about this lesson was how it was set up in that you were able to pull from other people's ideas. It made you think outside of your individual comfort zone as you were using elements in your drawing that you may not normally use. It was fun to design the way that I would go about creating this monster. As these were going to be clay models it would have helped if the teachers had students thinking more in terms of 3d but none the less it was definitely a unique way to lead off their unit on apocalypse.

I look forward to the next few weeks with more lessons to come!

Collaborative Class Clay Collage

Today is class Amanda and I did our themed based lesson from our "Mark Making: Making a Mark" unit. The image above is the final collage that the entire class constructed together using action and clay.

To begin the lesson we created a "class definition" of mark making by having students come up and either write specific words or draw "marks" on the white board. This conversation was very useful in developing a starting point for what the class would understand mark as. Terms such as "leaving an impression" and "additive/subtractive" were mentioned. As the lesson went on I kept adding certain terms to the white board as well to further develop this class definition.

The demo was then led by Amanda who demonstrated techniques in replicating texture onto pieces of clay. We explained the process of making quick gestural studies (being sure to define what gesture was) and prompted the students to create four forms of their own based on the presented natural objects. Feedback about this part was that it was successful in terms of loosening students up who were generally perfectionists and it was good that we warned them not to get too attached to their forms.

Then we presented work by a few artists, creating a class conversation about key terms such as chance, action, mark making, composition, and positive/negative space. We examined art work by Shinohara, Anastasi, and Zemer Peled in order to do this. In conversation about Peled we talked about energy and certain releases that the physical aspect of throwing clay may have. Feedback that we received about this was that it was successful in that we asked further questions based on student comments and did not dismiss what anyone was saying. Something to consider though in this presentation was developing a bit more about each artist.

After the presentation we began our class collaborative clay collage. I had a blast. We started the students off by throwing one form each and were all experimenting together, figuring out techniques to get the clay to stick, ways to throw it. We stepped back after this first throw and had a conversation. What did we notice? How were the pieces of clay interacting? Did the texture make it interesting. We threw two more, we spoke again. We threw a final piece and had a final discussion about how this work had developed. The class spoke about how this process made them feel. They had fun, they let out some stress.

The process of making this was extremely exciting. I would be absolutely thrilled to do this with an actual class of high school students. They way that they interacted with each other through the the making of this was inspiring. I feel as though this could set up a great classroom dynamic early on in the school year. Of course with the proper trust and safety precautions. Overall I was happy with what happened today. It was definitely exciting to this lesson play out in such a great way.