Fieldwork: Conversation with Students

On my last day of fieldwork at the high school, I was able to see the graphic design students finishing up the lesson on color mixing and creating thumbnail paintings. As they had some interferences student testing and then the hurricane they weren't as far along on the project as my mentor teacher and I had wanted them to be at this point. Even so, I was able to have a small discussion with three students who had completed the painting and then was able to answer any questions for the rest of the class as they finished out their work. It was nice to be able to talk to the few students that were done in sort of an informal assessment of what they had trouble with in regards to creating their paintings, what they thought was successful about their work, and what was something that they would change about their piece if they were to go back into it. The students revealed that matching the colors exactly was much more difficult than they would have thought. Each specific color became it's own unique challenge. It was evident that these students had worked particularly hard on their compositions as the colors were very close, even if they weren't one hundred percent satisfied with them. In the small discussion we talked about each of their paintings, putting it up next to the original composition. One student was excited about the way his composition turned out. He said that it was interesting to see it as a painting and that he would have never thought to do something like this. The next student had created two paintings because he was not thrilled with how the first came out. I appreciated this effort and he did too as he concluded that his second one came out much better because of it. He did in fact have a real challenge in color matching as the focal point of his piece was an iris of an eye. (lots of colors in there!) The third student's work was well done and exceptionally detailed. It is clear that this student has a great deal of natural ability. She explained that she enjoyed working this way to get to do something a bit different from the graphics work. All of the students were though excited to scan these imaged into the computer and see what they could manipulate and do from there. This small conversation allowed me to get a sense of what some of the students really got out of the project, which was definitely rewarding.