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.

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.