Artistic Thinking & Research

Idea generation and research is, perhaps, the most important part of developing any creative project.  In order to help students develop the skills to organize their visual lexicons, art teachers need to teach students the organizational tools they will need in order for research to work properly.  Often, teachers skip this step by making the assumption that students know how the design/creation process works, but this notion is a bit naïve.  In the past, inspirational organization may have involved images cut from magazines, or a collection of books or stories, but this is likely outdated now.  In the age of the iKid, I think it is increasingly easier for students to organize themselves because of the ease of online organizational tools.  With great sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, and others, students are looking for inspiration and storing it without really realizing that they are doing so.  I think these websites and apps, in themselves, teach organizational skills by requiring that items belong to larger categories.  Another benefit of using online organizing tools is that they are often searchable, which makes the process of finding inspiring images much easier than it has been in the past.  Students are already using most of these technologies, it is just a matter of teaching them to coherently organize their ideas through the use of categorization (from broad to a narrow scope).  By teaching students to use these tools, you are inherently showing them how to better organize their thoughts and ideas for any area of research.

Play

Play, which includes humor, experimentation, 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 the narrow scope of assignments.  I found the Pink chapter, in particular, to be a refreshing change of pace as far as my personal interests go.  For the sake of this week's assignment, I decided to challenge myself by using a material that I have never been academically trained in, which was watercolor.  The very notion of play means to experiment, to try something new, and to (most of all) have fun, so I decided that it wouldn't really be "playing" if I used something familiar.  While I am not a stranger to watercolor as a medium, I am by no means experienced or trained  in its properties.  I decided to paint a hot air balloon and got to work.  I knew that this experience would be challenging because watercolor has a tendency to be very fluid and difficult to work with, so I did all I could to keep the experience exciting and meant for learning.  Drawing didn't take long since my image was pretty simple.  When I got to the painting, I started with the balloon and saved the background for last.  The balloon wasn't extremely difficult, I just mixed several different colors and used them for different parts of the pattern on the balloon.  The background proved to be a more difficult feat because I was painting quickly and my colors kept bleeding and blending together when I didn't want them to.  Instead of getting upset and frustrated at this, I embraced the fluid, organic nature of the media and decided to try and fix the mistakes.  Overall, the entire experience was fun and heartwarming for me, because I tried my best to remain in a state of positivity and exploration amid frustration.  My painting came out pretty nicely, although there are a few things I would change about my sky if I had more time.  

I have had a few, but not many, "media play days" in my classroom, but maybe not enough.  I find that watching or trying technique alone is not enough to really get to know a certain material.  It is in the experience of attempt and failure that real learning takes place (as it inspires critical thinking such as: this didn't work out because...maybe I should try this instead...what could I do next...).  The experience has inspired me to try out more of these play days with my students, immersing them wholly in pure experimental time.

Visual Literacy Art Education

21^st Century students live in a world surrounded by images.  They are on billboards along the highway, on commercials on television, in magazines, in books, and nearly everywhere else you could possibly imagine.  In this visual world, it is becoming increasingly important that we, as art educators, take a stand and teach our students to decode and deconstruct the world in which they live.  Though the topic remains one of controversy amongst educators, I personally believe that a mix of art and visual culture education is beneficial to students in both their creative and personal endeavors.  Kuan Chung and Kirby (2009) share this belief, and state that, “an integrative pedagogy such as critical media art education suggests ways to raise social awareness and initiate possible changes through art” (38). 

Visual Culture is an area of study involving the depiction and analysis of images through deep exploration.  It relies heavily on culture studies and anthropology, with a hint of art history.  The images that surround our lives are full of meaning, providing rich opportunities for learning and discussion centered on the contemporary lives of students.  In Karen Keifer-Boyd and Jane Maitland-Gholson’s book (2007), Engaging Visual Culture, the importance and place of visual culture in the classroom is explored.  The text states that, “Meanings we make from visual information are foundational to future understandings.  Images that communicate their very identity to young people today impact who and what they will become as adults” (xvii).  This makes it an essential part of education that deserves to be investigated alongside art and art history.

Visual Culture is a fabulous tool for educators to utilize within the classroom.  Because it is relevant to students’ lives, they are engaged and interested in what there is to learn about the topic.  Visual Culture studies provide a rich experience for meaning-making that rivals many other topics because Visual Culture is the basis of images that bombard students every day, and shape their ideals and philosophies.  As art educators, it is our duty to educate students on how to look at and analyze the images of their every day in order for them to be successful artists and citizens.  It is easy to incorporate visual culture into the art classroom, with possible topics such as advertising, video games, comics and graphic novels, and avatars.  All of these topics pertain to art and visual culture, all the while giving students a chance to think critically about their world.  A sample unit of investigation might be as follows:

Exploring Advertising:

Essential Questions

What is advertising?

What kinds of ads do you see most?

Are ad creators artists?

What kind of effects do ads have on you and others?

What is your favorite advertisement?

Where do ideas about beauty come from?

Process & Product

Advertising is likely the single most important area of visual culture to study.  All people are surrounded with some form of advertisements, whether that be in magazines, television commercials, or billboards along the side of the highway.  In this unit, students will gaze into this world of advertising to learn to analyze and critique these ads.  Students will first spend time exploring essential questions.  Students will read Terry Barrett’s infamous article, Interpreting Visual Culture, and learn how to use denotation and connotation to deconstruct images.  Students will then look deeply at different forms of ads, looking for target markets and hidden ideals.  For the culminating activity, students will form groups, one being a designer and one being a client.  The groups will work together to create advertisements that satisfy their clients and sell a product of their choosing.  Students will be required to think like a designer and contemplate what messages their ads should send.  As a wrap up for the unit, students will write a reflective essay on the design process and the difficulties of expressing yourself and the ideas of a client simultaneously.

Tools for Collaboration

I was most struck by chapter eight of this week's readings on classroom discussion forums.  Johnson & Manning make the case that online courses have the potential to provide the same, if not better, quality of instruction as a live class.  As a student who has attended several online courses featuring discussion forums, I feel that I have been able to get a good look at this part of technology in education.  The Johnson & Manning text states that "what defines this form of communication [forums] as a discussion is the back-and-forth discourse, similar to discussion in real time.  However, what sets online discussion apart is classroom cousin is that, in the online environment, every voice has the opportunity to be heard"(62).  I will agree that the quality of the discussion in an online forum is what either makes or breaks a course.  Courses that are rich in dialogue and ideas that bounce back and forth from student to student are more interesting and offer more information for student's to glean.  However, I have also come to notice a big problem in discussion forums.  In a similar manner to what happens in person, students in the classes I have taken tend to comment or facilitate discussion with their  real-life friends, meaning that they do not read and contribute to every poster, which is contrary the suggestion provided by Manning & Johnson.  This means that every poster is not being heard because their posts are being skimmed or skipped over.  What I have found to have worked best for me, personally, was an online course outside of my major where I knew absolutely no one in the class.  That way, I had no prior perceptions about anyone's personality that kept me from reading or contributing to discussion.

I do feel that an online education can be successful, but I think that it requires a lot more than most courses have to offer.  Online conversation requires participation from everyone, including a lot of feedback from the teacher or professor.  Well-designed online courses have to engage students in the weekly material in a much different way than traditional classrooms, and I think this is only just beginning to be mastered.  Online discussion forums are, indeed, a lovely way to facilitate learning, but only if used properly by all users.

Topics in Digital Citizenship

Safety of Personal Information
I chose to explore the safety of personal information on the internet because it affects every person and every student.  Personal information includes anything for your name, address, and phone number to your bank account and social security number.  While this is something that may not typically be discussed in an art classroom, it is pertinent information for every student to learn as a pioneer on the digital sea.  I think that all too often, we (as a society) take the safety of the internet for granted and often send out personal information without hesitating to think about where it may be going.  It is increasingly important that students learn to navigate the tricky path that is giving out their information.  While this may be typically studied in a business class, it would be easy to tie this in to an art-related project.  In my classroom, we do a small unit on technology in which we discuss issues of privacy.  It would be easy to incorporate information safety into a unit like this.

Sexting
Sexting is a particularly fascinating topic to me, and one that sort of goes along with the safety of personal information.  Sexting seems to be increasingly popular among kids due to smartphones.  Picture messaging and snapchat (where your image disappears after a few seconds....unless you take a screenshot) make it effortless to send sexually charged messages to others.  However, the issue that I find with sexting doesn't seem to be with the images themselves, but rather with the trust you have with the person you send the images to.  In high school, it's easy for immaturity to take the lead and trust to go by the wayside, which is when trouble with sexting happens.  Sexting is an interesting and difficult topic to teach to kids, and in all honesty, it is probably something I would not discuss with my students. It may be more applicable in a health or FACS class, where the teacher can lead a discussion on why sending racy images might be dangerous, and how they could end up in the wrong hands.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_efkV0jAA0

Both of this week's readings had one theme in common: respect.  Using the internet requires more respect than even some personal relationships because there is so much gray area where what is said can be taken into different contexts.  It seems to be increasingly pertinent to teach kids to respect others, themselves, their rights to free speech, and privacy.  What most kids do not realize when posting on the internet is that their images and words can easily end up in someone else's hands.  I think the big lesson to be learned is that the idea of respect does not apply only to real life, but also to your digital life.  The more information that an individual has on a topic, the more likely they should be to proceed in a cautionary manner.  The real question becomes how to teach students this concept of digital respect in a way that really resonates with them, because I think that students have a tendency to sort of "shut off" when it comes to discussions on how they should behave.  When I was thinking of a solution to this problem, I was drawn back to our week spent on copyright, and thought that talking about those issues with your students might be a good segue into digital respect and responsibility.  Once students realize that what happens digitally has as much weight on life as what happens physically and verbally, they may open up to bigger discussions on internet safety.

Social Media in the Art Room

Hello world and everyone!  My apologies for the late responses that are coming both today and the rest of the week.  I have been very unwell and it has been an arduous task to read and write while being ill--hopefully my discussion still finds itself relevant.  I am, as I have previously expressed, a firm advocate for using technology in the classroom.  Though I hardly consider myself to be a connoisseur or innovator of such technologies, I think I am on a good path to inspire others to branch out to it.  Earlier this year, I started a Twitter account for my classroom.  It has started very slowly (and I still don't have many followers), but I some really amazing things have begun to emerge that would have never occurred had I not gotten an account.  I often tweet out inspirational messages, facts about art/artists, and questions which, when responded to, elicit extra credit opportunities.  Many of my students take part in the discussion of questions I ask, and it always warms my heart when they favorite something I write to them.  However, the great and amazing thing that has happened is that my students have started to tweet artwork and artists to me.  They take such pride in discovering something that goes along with what we are learning, or even something totally new.  I have found that Twitter, as a classroom social media, has gotten my students interested in art outside of my classroom and has reached students that I may not have otherwise.  Social media seems, to me, to be an extremely powerful motivator to get students truly interested and engaged in what they are learning.  As far as I am concerned, there is little risk in my communication with my students.  I don't follow them back on Twitter, so I don't see what they are writing to friends and I never post pictures of the kids without asking permission first.  This way, the risk of getting myself into trouble is miniscule.  The reward of seeing my students excited and happy about making discoveries on their own far outweighs any tiny amount of hesitation I have with using social media.  You can follow me on Twitter @MsEvansArtRoom.

When doing the reading for this week, I was most struck by the importance and weight of customization and social media (which also showed up in an article a few weeks ago).  The Brooks-Young chapter on social media notes that, "Members create a profile by completing a template where they can add information 'about me,'...and select emoticons to depict the member's current mood, and write blog posts"(49).  While that information may seem obvious and a bit outdated to most, I find it to be an intriguing little morsel.  The craving to customize is seen everywhere--in phone cases, in jewelry, in clothes, and it even rings true in the online realm.  The point of social media is to connect with others while sharing parts of yourself and highlighting what might be different or unique.  It's important to be able to showcase your personality within the social media of your choosing.

Multitasking

Funnily enough, as I sit down to write this post tonight, I'm on Facebook chatting with my sister, I'm texting, and I'm listening to music....and writing.  Multitasking is something I'm really used to, especially in the classroom.  I'm answering a question from one student, getting an X-Acto knife for another student, and taking attendance all at the same time.  I have learned to do many things at once, with pretty good accuracy.  Since this is something I know I'm good at, I generally expect it of my students as well.  I normally don't mind if students are listening to music or even texting from time to time.  What surprised me about the Rosen text was the study from Instant messaging affects academic reading time, but not test performance, which suggests that test takers who were interrupted by IMs did just as well as students who working uninterrupted.  I was surprised because I prematurely assumed that multitasking causes students to do a lesser job on tasks, so this study was definitely enlightening.  In the past, I have done projects using phones in the classroom, and I have even done a few polls (polleverywhere.com) in which students can vote on things for me via text, but this chapter has inspired me to take that a bit further.  It might be interesting to have some prompts about art/artists and have a "race" to  see who can find the answer fastest.