Blog Topic 6

This week, my students did a VTS of the following George Tooker painting:

My students have VTSed this artist twice now, and both times they have seemed really excited about the work.  Almost all students raised their hand at one point, and they were all really respectful of one another.  Some things they noticed about the image were:

• a clear divide in classes (rich vs. poor) due to clothing and items characters held
• a theme of pain, suffering, waiting, and imprisonment
• repetition within the painting (boxes, groups of people)
• a neutral color palette

My students seem to surprise me every week.  Sometimes their artmaking can really lack in critical thinking, and when the class participates in these discussions, I feel so impressed.  They have such great vocabularies about art and seem to notice many deep details in the work.  I think that my students artmaking abilities will really benefit from out VTS discussions because it gives them an opportunity to see how other artists create conceptual art.

Overall, the VTS felt really good to me.  I don't seem to be having any issues using the prescribed lines much at all.  My students seem to be getting used to having these discussions. as I have noticed that they are providing evidence for what they see without me having to ask them.  While I know this is inherently good, it sometimes throws off my balance during the discussion because it makes me really think about what I need to say next.

In the future, I really want to work on transitioning more smoothly.  A few of my students shouted out during the discussion without being called on, and I need to be able to better handle speaking to two students at once.  It is really surprising me how much I am enjoying this class and I really hope that it continues to be beneficial to my kiddos.

Blog Topic 5

Identifying a student VTS might help or challenge is a tough question in my situation.  Most of my students are operating at or above grade level, and most of them have high grade point averages.  However, a student who I believe VTS might help is Brad.  Brad is a really, really talented artist in my advanced art class.  He shows so much skill in technicality, but often lacks meaning in his artwork.  He doesn't participate much, if at all, in VTS discussions during class.  While I do think he is the "sit back and take it all in" type of person, I think he could greatly benefit from being involved in our VTS classroom discussions.  Getting Brad to participate in VTS could help him to see that artists create art to tell stories and share meaningful experiences, which he struggles with in his own work.  In the future, I think that I could ask all students to make at least one or two comments about the work we view during VTS so that all students participate without pointing him out.  Overall, my VTS discussions have gone really well so far and I can't wait to see where they go next.

Blog Topic 4

After a bit of a rough start with the written portion last week, I was really happy and intrigued with my results this week.  I did a VTS using the following image:

The main aspects of this image that my students noticed were:

• This is some type of dwelling, but it looks really bare
• A relationship between the woman and child
• The woman's clothes seem really nice, may elude to wealth
• The letter look really old and may have a link to the woman's past
• The woman's grip on the box in her lap and the woman's gaze

Overall, I was so super proud of my kids.  They picked out themes of time, place, and culture in this image, which I definitely was not expecting.  It was interesting to see how students would play off of one another's thoughts, creating theories of their own about this woman's story (there were lots of ideas about the letters being family heirlooms or that maybe someone she knew had been away at war).  The VTS definitely employed a sense of community during the discussion in that sense.  The only real issue I experienced was that when my kids got excited, they tended to talk out of turn, interrupting before I got a chance to paraphrase.  I think I can better avoid that next time by making sure the group understands my expectations before we start.  

I felt completely comfortable leading the discussion, and I noticed that I had a lot of patience, even when kids spoke without giving me a chance to.  Next time, I will absolutely take more time to develop expectations for a VTS discussion.

At the end, I had two students stay after class (at the end of the school day!!) to tell me how much they enjoyed the discussion.  They mentioned that they liked to hear other's stories and felt it was enjoyable to search for more in the artwork.  One student mentioned that he liked my inclusion of vocabulary words when I paraphrased their remarks.  I was really proud to hear that.  It was a fun discussion and I am really looking forward to the next one.  

Blog Topic 3

In all honesty, I was really surprised by my Pre-VTS assessments.  As I have mentioned earlier, I am moving through this class with my Advanced Art class.  I am not sure if the title of the class or my prior knowledge of my students gave me high expectations, but this exercise really made me realize that I believe my students to be more advanced viewers and artists than they really are.  I felt a bit disappointed, because, really, many of my students blew through the exercise, writing only a few sentences about what they saw (and I have done VTS with some of them before).  I would say my students are probably somewhere in between stage 2 and 3 viewers, by wanting to expand on ideas and imagery, but not have as much background in Art History and technique as a historian would.  Before I sound too negative here, there were around three students who did an exceptional job, picking up things that I hadn't noticed in the given image.  So it may be that I really have a range of viewing skills in my classroom.

Peer VTS

I completed my peer VTS last week, and overall, it went great.  Most of the adults felt pretty comfortable, but the other art teacher mentioned that she felt a lot of pressure about looking at the work.  The image I chose was "Dad's Coming" by Winslow Homer.  Everyone participated, and most people seemed interested, though there were a few people who joked around about not having an art background.  The general responses I got afterward were:

• VTS helped the narrative/story come together for the participants
• VTS forces you to continue to look for more, even if you think you have noticed everything
• helped to think critically about the image 
• encouraged you to revisit objects or things in the image you already looked at

Overall, the experience went really well and I even had one group member ask if I could help her do this with her students.  

Blog Topic 1

For those who don't remember, I teach art at Fulton High School.  The class I have chosen to VTS with is my Advanced Art class.  I only have 14 students in this class, so will be a pretty small sample, but I think that VTSing with tis group will provide a great sense of community for the kids.  This class is mostly composed of junior and seniors who have taken the other art classes at the high school.  Most of them want to go in to an art field, but some just want a place to express themselves.  The class is very independent--they develop their own projects to complete throughout the year that will benefit their portfolios.  I can definitely see VTS benefitting this class.  Most of these kids have a pretty large art vocabulary already, but I think it will help the students to better develop their own ideas about artwork and form opinions on them based on visual evidence.  I'm really excited for this class and can't wait to see what kind of beautiful things emerge.

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.