22

Blog 22: Where do our notions of visual art as a solitary activity come from?

What are the benefits and limitations of engaging in collaborative works of art?

I would suspect that some people would consider visual are to be a solitary activity because there is much emphasis on self-expression through the arts. Some people would assume that it is impossible to express yourself, if the piece was being made by a team of people.

A second suspicion of mine is that the way in which we are taught art introduces the solitary aspect. From a very early age we are expected to make art individually. Young children are very often told to respect each other’s space and property, and not to interfere with one another. This is never more clearly exemplified when kids are given ‘art time’ and each child has their own 8”X11” sheet of paper to draw on. Sure the kids may share ideas and look at their peer’s work, but when are they encouraged to collaborate on a single drawing? How uncomfortable are we as adults when someone else works on our projects?

In school art assignments are usually skill acquisition based and therefore solitary art best facilitates the assessment of the individual.

The benefits to collaborative works of art are infinite. There is no way to calculate the possible benefits to human interaction. Collaborating on art is the same as collaborating on anything else, it is human interaction, and that has benefits on spiritual, intellectual, creative, moral, physical and just about every level. The greatest theme to collaborative works of art is the negotiation. Simply representing human interaction visually is its own benefit.

23! "the number 23 is everywhere in my life.."

Blog 23: What has this experience of working collaboratively added to your understanding of what one learns through art?

One aspect of art that is understated also happens to be one aspect that relates it more closely to the other educational disciplines. Works of art are packed with meaning. Metaphors and symbols, and statements and choices and questions that need to be addressed, dissected and answered. In that process, collaboration is essential to artwork, after all, a conversation needs multiple participants. Whether collaboratively critiquing or creating an artwork, a discourse is formulated in which profound intellectual and moral conflicts are (hopefully) resolved through negotiation and compromise. In that respect collaboration in art is a microcosm of society as a whole. Understanding art is very much akin to understanding culture. I really believe that to study and know the artwork of one culture is to understand that culture.

“Individual” art, if there is such a thing, has no negotiated understanding of an iconology, motif or technical choice. This lack of negotiation truly leads to a detached and delusional interpretation of everything, as there is no outside ‘corrective’ influence. By corrective influence I refer to those modest and constructive criticism that helps an artist refine their ideas, whether by defending the ideological basis, introducing new handling techniques, or simply having a ‘fresh pair of eyes’ to look at it.

Blog 19

Blog 19

1. What does learning in a community-based setting afford children?

2. What are they able to learn in a community-based setting that they would not be able to learn in a school setting?

3. What does teaching in a community-based setting afford the educator?

4. What can one do in a community-based setting that one could not do in a school?

1. Learning in a community setting provides children with a hegemony to fall back upon to support their learning. Not only will they have instruction, but in a community setting they will have the chance to observe others, and pick up things intrinsically from their environment.

2. A community setting offers the children self placement, whereas a classroom cannot. In a community the child has the opportunity to experiment with groups and roles. In a community the child has many places and roles to play. In the classroom the child is predominantly just the student.

3. Teaching to a ca community gives the educator the reward of impacting a diverse group, working with many personalities and developmental levels. It also impacts the educator’s understanding of negotiated instruction and the group leaders.

4. A community setting has the potential for a greater sense of self discipline. With community leaders and an established hierarchy present, the educator may have the freedom of not concerning her/himself with the discipline of the group. ( this is not always the case)

blog 17 (Boruqe's jersey #!)

Blog 17:

· Describe your most meaningful learning experience in a museum or art gallery.
· What elements made it so?
· Relate this experience to Dewey’s notion of a “good” experience.


My most meaningful learning experience in a museum was when I was a little boy. My mother had taken my brother and I to Banff for a weekend, and besides visiting the hotsprings, we went to a native cultural centre. There were mannequins set up in dioramas. The figures were dressed in various clothing styles according to the creed they were depicting, and they were set up to perform various celebrations. The mannequins looked so life-like to me I thought they were about to start moving and dancing before my eyes. I have been enchanted with native arts and culture ever since.
The clothing and costumes were exciting and so foreign to me. Some of the acts depicted were shocking, particularly the sun dance of the plains people. A male dancer would revolve around a tall pole that was tied to the piercings on his body by long cords of sinew. I thought it was so cool.



I believe that Dewey would consider this a very good experience, because the content was totally new and rewarding to me, it was presented in a manner I found interesting and was easy to absorb, and it left a strong impression upon me in a cultural and artistic sense.

blog 16

Blog 16:
1. What issues arose as you tested your lesson plans?
2. Why did these issues arise?
3. Can you ever fully anticipate every detail of the situation you will be working in?
4. What role does planning play in a responsive teaching approach?
5. After reading Chapter 19, do you need to modify your plans to address safety issues?

1. The biggest problem I had with my plan was to keep the students engaged and excited about the parts of the ‘lesson’ that were not games. I should have kept the ‘lecture’ short to match their attention spans.
2. These issues arose because 10,11,12 year olds don’t have the patience to sit in the floor and describe the good and bad features of 13 of their peers’ drawings.
3. Fully anticipation is unreal. There are far too many variables in real life to be prepared for every possibility. However, thematic reactions to a situation can be anticipated.
4. Planning is essential in any teaching environment. Without a general plan there would be no guarantees about what topics are discussed and what the students are actually subjected to. Although it may be beneficial to deviate from the plan once and a while in order to facilitate the students’ own initiative, walking into a teaching situation without a proposed outcome or intended process can lead, quickly, to pandemonium.
5. I believe my plans were totally safe. There was no serious risk of physical injury, as for emotional injury, my activities were not embarrassing in nature or beyond the children’s grasp developmentally.

Cub documenting 2 & 3 INCOMPLETE

Wednesday March 17

Today I met the children and had the opportunity to talk with them about road signs and why we have them.
The cubs were baffled that I knew their names before I had met them. Which was fun
It was really hard to get them to answer the questions one at a time, but they got the basic understanding of the signs we had to show them.
I tied up the road safety lesson with a quick talk about traffic lights, making sure the kids knew what the different colours meant. this was a good transition into our new game!

I taught them the very basic rules to the red light green light game. red is go green is stop, and I decided to throw in yellow, which meant slow(even though technically that is not what it means on the traffic light-oh well!)
We had a deaf boy in the cub group so I had to change the game from how I learned it as a child. Instead of calling out the colours, I had to flash coloured paper. It worked to our advantage actually, because as we quickly learned, once the cubs had ran passed me they could no longer see the colours and ran all the way to the finish. ( somewhat more accurately representing cars in an intersection)
So we changed the game so that the cubs had to run passed me no matter where I stood in the room. the kids had to be more aware and alert, because I would run across the room and they`d have to chase me!

Unfortunately, replicating the fundamentals in their own signs was almost a complete failure, with the exception of 2 or 3.



Wednesday March 24

Today was the big day: the Finale And it couldn't have gone any better! It was cold outside, so Rob's plans for an outdoor game were scrapped. In his plan, Rob structured it so that he and I would be almost working as a pair with the children. It was structured so much better than last week, and I was much more comfortable in this set up. I had a few minutes to chat with the kids and get them thinking about colour symbols and how we use colour in language to describe feelings. They nailed it. Stella ( the outspoken 11 year old girl) brought up the expression green with envy, Justin tried to turn his face red when I had mentioned how in cartoons the character's face will turn red when they're angry. Other children mentioned things like feeling blue when they're sad, and it went well the kids were digging it. Because we kept the pace up and keep the kids moving around I had a much more successful outing.


Wednesday March 31 2010

SOOO.. today was the presentations day, and I relayed my experience to the class.
I need not explain what happened, you were there!
I did get some interesting feedback today though. Thank you for the strategies,
for playing the games, and being patient with my lack of pictures.

Documenting isn't just about taking notes about what we did,
to document with a purpose there ought to be a central question.

So I have to ask: To what degree should Kinetic learning/teaching be embraced and incorporated in a community learning experience?

I have to say, getting those kids to pay attention was very difficult. Unlike high school kids, with whom I have experience coaching, the 10-12 year olds' attention is primarily concerned with figitting and only God knows what they chatter about. Some of the techniques I use with the rugby players are very inappropriate for children that age, for example yelling at them to get them to listen, or making off colour remarks or sexual innuendo when they do something well.

With the incredible level of energy in the 10-ish year old group, I would argue that Kinetic learning should be the equal if not superior to dictation or reading. I witnessed firsthand how the children would pick up on underlying concepts in games, for example, the necessity of rules and the consistency of those rules in society. Compared to their general unwillingness or inability to sit still for 10 minutes to participate in a show and tell type of work, hitching onto their energetic behaviour is pretty much the only way to get through to them.
It is not as though they are incapable of listening to an adult, because like I mentioned in class, the most apparently disconnected outsider of the group had absorbed and reflected the most from the discussion about traffic signs.

Looking back I wish I had employed a more ‘game-like’ method for displaying and discussing the road-signs they had drawn. I was pleased with how the games went well and their eagerness to talk about colour symbols.

With a university audience I noticed that the kinetics wasn’t accepted as wholly. This could be for several reasons,
· It was the end of class and people wanted to go
· At our age the linguistic and abstract thinking centres are dominant, not kinetic thinking
I’ll let you decide which is the most likely. ;)

build up to Child Workshop

WRITE OUT THE QUESTIONS YOU WILL ASK YOUR PARENT (CUB LEADER) ABOUT THE CHILDREN’S LEARNING CHARACTERISTICS.

I asked Rob, the cub leader, about what themes they are covering with the cubs; if there was a timeline they had to follow and what supplies they had. Rob was very upfront with the details about his cub pack. Without even asking he told me that of the fourteen cubs, 12 were boys, 8 were at least 10 years old, 4 were hi-energy and perhaps coded, 1 was deaf, and that most were third year cubs. The hi-energy of the group simultaneously excited and intimidated me. I knew that I could have alot of fun with a hi-energy group, but at the same time I became nervous about getting them to pay attention. I tried to make a plan that utilised their hi energy in the provocation.

Because I didn’t expect Rob to know what each child liked to draw or was interested in on an artistic level, I never asked. I may be mistaken, he could know what each kid likes to draw, but regardless, I believe that in order to create a general assignment relevant to all the children a good provocation and strong link to the cub scout curriculum would work better than trying to congeal all the children’s specific art-interests.

I intend on providing an expanse of materials for the final project, and a somewhat diverse list of materials for the first warm-up project. This should ensure that each child finds a media they enjoy, and also that each child has the opportunity to grow their media repertoire.

My take on this assignment has somewhat fundamentally changed the nature of it. I have reduced the number of visits, and increased the number of children, meaning that I have one chance to create a project that provides a pertinent and interesting art experience for them and myself, rather than a series of one on one visits with a particular child that would make me adamantly aware of his/her needs, interests, and abilities.

THE AREAS THAT I MIGHT LIKE PARENTS TO EXPLORE

It would be really heart-warming if the parents would build on the lesson I give about colour symbolism and provide an outlet for the kids to express themselves with art. Whether it be art lessons for the kids or as simple as providing art supplies and enthusiasm for their child’s work, it would be very rewarding to find that the kids and their parents took a renewed interest in art following my meetings with the cubs.