Facilitating Critical and Aesthetic Inquiry

As we wrap up the Carroll text this week, I would like to let everyone know that I really enjoyed this book.  It's divided up into several sections, all by category, and each mini-section was about a related topic and was short and concise, which I think can sometimes be the most effective writings.

A few things I noticed within the reading:

• Organization (diagrams, patterns, categories) is key to structure in art education.
• Sound, movement, and performance can be integrated into the art room to create more well-rounded, more effective engagement
• Different kinds of questions should be used in different situations by the teacher (guided, leading, etc.)
• Questioning creates higher levels of thinking
• "The viewer, object, and context are all involved in creating meaning" (153).  This parallels what we are talking about in my LTC 8900 class with Nick Kremer right now.  
• Metaphor and story are critical to creating meaning in artmaking

For my related article this week, I have chosen Inquiry-Based Art Instruction: A Framework for Developing Creative and Critical Thinking, published in Art Education Magazine, and written by Nancy Lampert.

This article aligned perfectly to the reading for this week.  Lampert states that, "Art lessons that pose open-ended art problems require students to use creative and critical thinking as they produce art."  Encouraging open-ended questions and problems in the art room allows students to be more creative and more innovative because they are making their own choices about materials, composition, color, form, function, and many other aspects of art.  I thought this article really hit the nail on the head when it stated that, "Inquiry-based teaching strategies pose questions to challenge students’ thinking about art and artmaking, as opposed to teaching strategies that give directions to students about how to make art."    Giving students this freedom not only produces a better end product, but it teaches our students to think critically about not only art, but life.

https://www.arteducators.org/research/Translations_Spring_12-2-_Lampert.pdf

Project Proposal

During both my first year as a teacher and a graduate student, my personal aesthetic has transformed and changed along with my knowledge about teaching.  The personal experiences of my life have influenced my desire to create art and the style in which to make it.  I have had a growing interest in using natural dyes within my fiber art-making.  Though I have used natural dyes a few times before, I have never really delved into a large research and product relationship.  I propose that I will first experiment with these materials on my own, and then create a lesson in which my students can try out this artform.  My final product will be in the form of  quilted square, which will be dyed using all natural materials.  My student lesson will require the same, but at the end of the project, all of the squares will be stitched together to create one collaborative class quilt.

I am interested in using these natural, sustainably produced products to color fabrics that will eventually become this quilt, with each patch or piece created by a different student.  I have never created a quilt before, but in my personal artwork, I create abstract works using geometric shapes to explore the relationship between man and nature (machine sewn v. hand sewn, naturally dyed v. eco-dyed, geometric v. organic shapes, earth tones v. bright hues).  I believe that researching more about naturally dyeing fabrics will help to influence my artwork for many years to come.  Experimenting and learning about both this material and about quilt-making will help me to grow as an artist and as a teacher because, as we have learned, the notion of play and experimentation is vital to personal growth as an artist.  This new kind of media will inspire my students to think big about their artwork and realize that not only traditional methods of artmaking are the only ones that are accepted.

Resources:

Dyes from Kitchen Produce

Eco-Colour-India Flint

A few examples of recent and in-progress work:

Facilitating Engagement with the Art-Making Process

This week's reading in the Carroll text was all about how to get students to be engaged with the artmaking process by thinking creatively and using experimentation.  I found a great article by George Szekely from Arts & Activities Magazine entitled Children as Art Teachers.  The article advocates for our students to teach art too because, "having children be art teachers presents an opportunity for significant talks about art."  Allowing our students a chance to be the teacher provides for a great opportunity for our students to develop both confidence and creativity in their artmaking.  I thought this article to be a lovely breath of fresh air and it was great to read Szekely's ideas.  I thought that the article went along with the Carroll reading for this week perfectly, especially since an opportunity such as this would be an investigative discovery for both students and teachers.

Here is a link for the article, it might not work unless you sign in to Ebsco.

http://ehis.ebscohost.com.proxy.mul.missouri.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=e731784b-80ac-471c-9039-72c40ee1a293%40sessionmgr13&vid=11&hid=109

Expanding the Repertoire for Visual Perception and Artistic Response

I had a bit of a hard time finding an article that was directly related to the subject of our recent reading, but as I was reading this month's issue of School Art's Magazine, I read an article that struck me and was directly related to this week's reading.  The article can be found here, http://www.schoolartsdigital.com/schoolarts/201303#pg26, and is titled, The Sound of Art, by Denise Clyne Ruch.  The article details a project for an elementary classroom, where students create sound suits inspired by contemporary artist Nick Cave (I know the Tiger Artists did a similar project a few semesters back as well).  

What I loved about the article was that it detailed, like this weeks reading, that students require "a repertoire of representational skills...to express ideas visually, spatially, and in time-based media (Carroll)."  Ruch's description of this project is advocating for the same principles.  She quotes Simon Nicholson in her article, stating that, "In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it."  A project such as this allows students' creativity and ability to imagine art in a number of different realms and also helps students to grow both as artists and in their repertoire for artistic response.  The article (and projects such as this) advocates for community and creativity in the art room, and though I had a rough time finding a great article to share, I found this one to be inspirational to my own imagination.

Compassion: William Kentridge

The artist I have chosen for a possible lesson of instruction is William Kentridge, featured in an episode of Art:21 on Compassion and in the short documentary, Anything is Possible.  William Kentridge is a South African artist who creates films out of large-scale charcoal drawings that he photographs.  Kentridge uses an intense process of drawing, erasing, photographing, and then using computers to create the film.  What strikes me the most about Kentridge is his interest within his work in political issues, for example, apartheid in Africa, a close issue for Kentridge.

I think that Kentridge can inspire great products in the art room.  I am fascinated both by his ideas and his artmaking process.  For a possible project, kids could create films about a social issue relating to compassion that strikes them (for example, poverty, hunger, homelessness).  To get kids thinking about this idea, the teacher could show the following short documentary on human rights: http://www.humanrights.com/#/what-are-human-rights (which by the way, is available for free to get by DVD if you sign up for it).  Speaking from experience, this is a great resource to get kids thinking about many different social and political issues that are happening in our contemporary world, and it cane inspire a great discussion on the issues that are plaguing our world. Though most of the time I try to stray away from copying an artists technique exactly, I think that kids would really enjoy creating a stop motion film about one of these topics.  However, instead of creating a drawing like Kentridge, kids could feel free to photograph their film using any props that they feel necessary.  This allows for a lot of great experimentation with modeling clay, paper folding, props, drawing, and body movement.  Experimentation such as this allows for a lot of hands on learning that can sometimes be much more effective than demonstrating or asking all of the students to use the same materials for the video.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/william-kentridge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmvK7A84dlk

Duncam's Seven Principles

Paul Duncam's article, Seven Principles for Visual Culture Education, published in Art Education magazine, makes a new case for curriculum in art education.  Duncam, like Olivia Gude, agrees that current school arts are much too outdated for our technologically-driven classrooms and offers "seven principles for examining various forms of imagery", which are: Power, Ideology, Representation, Seduction, Gaze, Intertextuality, and Multimodality.  It is these seven principles that guide Duncam's proposal for curriculum in the arts, which he says should not be taken as "fundamental truths", but ideas to create "curriculum commensurate with the extent and complexity of today's visually mediated world."  In the article, Duncam discusses each of these items in depth (which I will not do here, you all read the article, too)  and offers a new way to look at visual culture in the classroom.

There were a few things in this article I liked and agreed with, but for most of it, I felt a bit indifferent.  I think that Duncam had a good idea when he intended to create a new visual culture-based curriculum for the arts, but his ideas, for me, seem to miss the point.  I most liked his passage on multimodality, which seems to be the most important of the seven principles.  Multimodality essentially refers to the fact that when viewing an image, other things will always be affecting your perception of said image.  Duncam says, "images never appear without words, music, or other sounds.  Even in art galleries, images appear with labels, and their assumed significance is deeply grounded in art history texts and columns of written critique."  This seems to be the single most important thing from Duncam's article.  People, myself included, have a tendency to forget that all of these little nuances are affecting the way we view something.  Thus, multimodality was great to read about from this article.  I also liked what Duncam mentioned on intertextuality.  Duncam stated that, "all images relate to other cultural texts such as books, poems, music, and, of course, other images.  I think the reason I liked this passage so much was because it directly correlates to multimodality--an images intertextuality directly affects how multimodal the image is.

For the remainder of the article, I found myself thinking it was sort of "bof" (French sound of indifference).  This article just didn't resonate with me as much as Olivia Gude's did.  I really believe that Gude is the future and "savior" of art education.  Her ideas bring so much more to the table than Duncam's.  And though I hate to hate on him, his article just didn't do it for me.