The Imagination Spark I have chosen is 12.5, Finishing the Story. When I first read the description of this particular spark, I couldn't help but connect it to the series finale of The Sopranos, which is infamous for leaving its viewers in the midst of a tense scene and no answer to what happens to any of the characters. I think that the suspense and edge-of-your-seat feeling that those sorts of scenes spark has to much potential for many great ideas and pieces of artwork. I can see this being utilized in my own classroom in a few ways. The first of which would be to change an ending to an existing story that the students may not have enjoyed or thought should be altered. The second way would be for students to create some sort of narrative within a piece of artwork, and then when they are about 3/4 done, the entire class could trade artworks and create the ending to the story of the artwork. This would promote collaboration, and I think that my students would be so excited to decide the fate of the story and what direction it might take.
Eisner Chapters 1 & 2
In The Arts and the Creation of Mind, Elliot Eisner spends a lot of time at the beginning of the book discussing why imagination is important and how the arts relate to cognitive functioning in humans. He also spends a great deal of time on the topic of theory in art education as far as teaching styles goes. However, it was a small section of the book that I found to be incredibly interesting. I am fascinated with the idea that experience guides our perceptions, whether that be in life, art, or ideas. Eisner talks a lot about how our experiences as humans affects our ideas and innovations. On page four, he says, "Imagination, fed by the sensory features of experience, is expressed in the arts through the image." I think what Eisner means is that a person's background dictates what that person creates and what they see in the creations of others'. This notion reminds me a lot of a few things we learned in Nick Kremer's Visual Literacy and Visual Culture this past spring semester. We read a book titled Semiotics and Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, and Significance by Deborah L. Smith-Shank in which this idea was also explored. In her text, she wrote that, "We always bring our own experiences to any understanding of any sign, however hard we attempt to keep our own biases out of the formulation of meaning. That means that our informed responses to visual input are every bit as important as what they artist was initially trying to convey (2)." As I am connecting the Eisner reading to something I have previously read, I keep finding myself contemplating the role of my own experiences in my perceptions and beliefs about art and education, and I can't help but be fascinated the relationships between them.
Freedman Chapter 1
Teaching Visual Culture, by Kerry Freedman, is definitely a bit harder to read than the other texts for this class, but it still had a lot of important information to be found within in, nonetheless. Freedman spends the majority of the chapter discussing what visual culture is and why it is relevant and critical for students to learn. He also provides a bit of a timeline for how the teaching of visual culture has changed within art education throughout time. What struck me the most in this chapter was the role of identity in visual culture education. Freedman says, "Education is a process of identity formation because we change as we learn; our learning changes our subjective selves...Individuals appropriate characteristics of visual representations, adopting these representations as a description of himself/herself (2)." When thinking about the role of identity in visual culture, I am reminded most of objects. Objects are the things that make up the bulk of visual culture (other than advertisements) and I think that there is something to be said for them. As I am looking around my home (newly moved into this past weekend, I might add!) I am surrounded by objects--some that I have collected, some that have been given to me, and some that have mysteriously been left and forgotten here by others. All of these objects that I surround myself must be important to me, otherwise, why would I surround myself with them? When I am asking myself these questions, I can see how this can create an inspiring lesson for my kids by looking at the objects in their room and in their lives. I think it could have some very powerful results for them to investigate what it is about the objects they collect that represents them, and how their identities are shown through those items.
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