Reading Reaction and Reflection 5

Pink: Play 
I was so happy to read this book because I immediately recognized the name of Dr. Madan Kataria.  As a practitioner of yoga for around three years, I am fairly familiar with the work he does with laughter yoga in India.  It's been something that interests me, but that I have yet to try, and reading more about it just makes me want to do it all the more.  Play, which includes humor and gaming and happiness, is something that I try to embody in my day-to-day life, as well as something that likely occurs in all of our art classrooms.  Play is important to the art room because it encourages creativity and imagination and experimentation, which can sometimes be limited by assignments.  I found this book to be a refreshing change of pace and I am super excited to see what is in store for us tomorrow.

Eisner Chapter 6
This Eisner reading focused on curriculum in the arts and how standards can impact the efficiency of teaching.  In one area of the text I really liked, Eisner discussed assessment and the downfalls that it can have within art education.  He states, "Like teaching, evaluation is often treated as a separate or independent process, something on does after one teaches a curriculum.  The fact of the matter is that evaluative activity goes on concurrently with both curriculum planning and teaching (150)."  I liked this idea because assessment was something I struggled with during my first year of teaching.  I found myself giving my students arbitrary rubrics that were mostly based on technique and their mastery of that technique rather than conceptual ideas.  As the year progresses, I began having my students write mini-artist statements at the end of projects to discuss their ideas and media instead of basing their grades on technical skill.  I found that this had great effects on how interested the students were in their artwork because they knew that their ideas were important and not an offhand remark.  I also liked that Eisner mentioned that standards should be something that teachers discuss and consider, but should not be something that is used to create cookie-cutter lessons in order to create assignments.  I think that sometimes teachers can get caught up in meeting each and every standard required of them, and eventually lose sight of what is truly important in artmaking.

Freedman Chapter 6
This chapter was essentially a summation of this entire course.  It centers around the issues of current art curriculum and how a positive change can be facilitated within our field.  It seems unnecessary to go into depth here, as it is a review of the purpose of this class.