This week, students are starting to get rolling on their first projects. I have finally gotten to conferences with students about their project plans and discuss their ideas, which is my favorite part of the process. We have almost finished our first mini lesson on voice about artists' purpose. Each day I have been sharing a few reasons that artists choose to make art. On Monday, we should finish up and then on Tuesday we will start talking about themes.
My advanced student is interested in the artwork and history of tarot cards and is working on creating her own set. They struggle a lot with making meaning in their artwork. I think their artwork is very meaningful, but they don't see it because the decisions are so automatic and they aren't good at breaking down their thinking. When asked why they made a certain decision they often reply "Because it looks cool." I hope to encourage them to be more mindful of their choices. They are doing a lot of research on the specific cards and the meaning behind them and creating their own interpretations of the figures and symbols in them. We discussed one specific card they were working on that had a star on the characters back. The student didn't have a reason for using the star so we looked at a book from the classroom library that has symbols from different sources and cultures. At the end of the conversation, they seemed excited to add more depth to their choices in the pieces. A new student in my Drawing class is showing a lot of progress in her concepts. She struggled a lot in her first project getting off of Google images and thinking about what she wanted to express in her piece. For the project she is currently working on, she is choosing to make art about her adoption and how her parents were in the process of adopting a baby from Japan, but met her and adopted her instead. She chose a shallow image, a Japanese cherry blossom tree, to express this idea, but we discussed cropping and how she could use color to make the composition more powerful and to express the complexity of the emotions of this piece. I was happy to see her go deeper in this project even if her image was cliche. For her next piece, I want to encourage her to dig deeper if she is still stuck on shallow interpretations. My mixed media class has so many powerful voices in it that blow me away with their depth. I wish they would blow me away with their productivity as well. Two students were inspired by the slide from the mini-lesson about artists expressing the intangible and spiritual, and started having deep philosophical conversations that they both mentioned in their planning conference and in their journals. One is now making her piece about how it is easy to see the bystander's obligation to help when someone is physically in trouble, but people don't see it when someone is struggling mentally or with bullying. I struggled with how to begin my Theoretical Framework this week, but once I got going, I think I found some clarity in my direction. It reminded me that the dialogue between myself and the students was a critical reason why I am so drawn to choice based art in the first place. Going forward, I will be thinking more about how TAB supports students being about to critically reflect, self actualize, and develop more awareness of themselves and others, and I will be looking for moments when students are doing this in their journals.
1 Comment
Wendy
10/10/2016 08:11:17 pm
Morgan,
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AuthorMorgan Singleton is a secondary art educator with a Master's degree in art education. Archives
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