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.