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!