Reading Reflection and Reaction 4

Eisner Chapter 5
Today's Eisner reading felt mostly like review.  It detailed how children learn in the arts, and what processes they must go through in order to be able to better their skills.  One of my favorite parts of the chapter was when Eisner mentioned that teacher's should not skip around from medium to medium, for example, clay one week, drawing the next week, and painting the next.  Eisner stated that this doesn't provide a deep enough immersion in the material and provides inadequate learning opportunities for students.  I couldn't agree more, and I really think that this is the reason that college courses are so helpful in developing skills.  I know that there are many schools that separate their art classes, and those teachers should feel lucky.  Though it is important to teach many materials, I do believe that spending a great deal of time with a specific media provides greater learning experiences.  In another passage from the Eisner text, I found a quote that I both liked and disliked simultaneously.  It reads: "When there is no challenge, when everything is satisfactory, there may be little motivation to stretch one's thinking, to try something new, to experiment, to revise, to appraise, and to start again.  Creativity profits from constraints (96)."  I absolutely love the first sentence of the quote.  Challenging students to think critically about what they are making and why always produces a better product.  However, I keep getting stuck on that last part of the quote--"Creativity profits from constraints."  While I do agree that students do need guidelines and problems to solve, constraining projects too much inhibits creativity, so I disagree with Eisner there.  I think that creating great assignments is all about finding a balance between a well-designed problem that will help to guide students in their thinking and a problem that narrows their thinking too much.  Creating assignments is really an art within itself.

Freedman Chapter 5
The Freedman chapter for today was all about how to teach your students to interpret visual culture.  Visual culture, I think, is one of my favorite and most pertinent things I have had the opportunity to learn about in the past several months.  Teaching visual literacy and visual culture is not only important for students to develop a critical eye, but it is necessary for them in the world that we live in.  Teaching these sorts of skills helps to foster a critical and analytic mind that students can continue to use throughout their lives.  It helps them to examine and think about the world that they live in, the products that they buy, and the things that the see on a day-to-day basis.  To this end, Freedman says, "The impact of imagery has a wide range of sociopolitical and economic issues which, in turn, influence students' identities, notions of citizenship, beliefs about democracy, and so on (97)."  In other words, teaching students how to decode their environments helps to inform them if their personal and cultural identities, while allowing them to look more deeply at the world around them.