Hello, Tam in Iowa here. I just wanted to write a quick blog
post on some changes I have been making in the area of ….well…pretty much everything
I have done in the past 10 years.
After working with a visiting artist on a large scale
sculpture for our community, I had a huge mind shift on how and what I am
teaching in Art.
This visiting artist/sculptor travels to businesses to share
with them the incredibly important vital role of creativity in their business
model.
He had several statistics to prove how important it is to
change the mind shift from everything requires “one answer” (like math and
chemistry require) to almost every other discipline that can have “many answers”
(like the arts allow). He used a funnel to show the student artists how math provides
one answer but the arts provide many different answers.
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| Art or Math? |
Whoa, amazing right? Blew my mind.
It got me to thinking…how I am I teaching art in the 21st
century? Every art educator has standards and every school has expectations, but what do I believe art education should look like and what do I think the purpose of arts education is?
For the last ten years, I have practiced a Discipline Based art education program. I teach a visual alphabet - the elements of art and principles of design. I still believe it is
important that all students know the visual alphabet. Otherwise, their
artwork just looks well, crappy. I mean seriously, how could you write without the
alphabet? How can you create visual art without the visual alphabet?
Keep in mind, I think process step by steps are valuable
SOMETIMES to learn new techniques and ideas. I also believe craftsmanship is important, I want everyone to do their best .
BUT the question that haunted me was how was I investing in
their minds? How was I allowing them to express their ideas? How often were
they climbing up Bloom’s Taxonomy? Was I doing all that for them?
Yikes, yes I was. Many
times we all “created” art that looked the same. I was doing the work for them. Below is a Jim Dine study. Yes, they are different but they didn't have to do much thinking to use the template, and overlap.
So, I believe they need to learn the visual alphabet, I
believe they need to do some step by steps, I believe I need to demonstrate how
to use materials. How in the heck does that add up to expression? Can it be
combined with creativity?
Turns out, yes it can! And turns out, it’s going to take
some time for me to get there.
This year, I introduced the elements of art to all students.
We defined terms and made lines, shapes, you get the picture. After the intro
was over, the mind shift began.
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| Intersecting Shapes |
We just switched to using rubrics, studios, and student- centered
decision making. The first studios are basically learning how to read a rubric
and follow the steps on it to make a specific work of art. For example, in
fourth grade the choices are
Pen Pal Artist(we study another young student artist who has
a website, they create a painting using favorite dots, lines, colors, and they
write a letter to him)
America (they read a book about art that shows freedom in
America and pick a medium to express how they feel about freedom in America)
Scratch Art Animal (any animal, must use texture)
Wordless Book (they read wordless books, develop their own
story line, and draw a wordless story)
Skyscrapers of New York City(learn about building skyscrapers, do experiments, build a skyscraper out of rolled newspaper and tape)
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| wordless book |
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| Scratch Art Animal |
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| What Freedom Means to Me |
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| Skyscrapers of NYC |
Still, a little structured right? But not as much, right?
Blowing my mind further is going to be independent studies
that students choose to investigate artists or art they have always wanted to
create. I will be the resource person to get them the stuff.
One kid said to me, “I wish we had a studio
about Andy Goldsworthy, it was so fun working with natural materials last year.”
Guess
what that kid is getting for Christmas?
That’s enough words for today, we can only think about so
much at once right?
More later on how to frontload these studios and the
management things NOT to do (that’s how I learn).
Sincerely and with much love and respect for what you all
do!
Tam in Iowa
