Readings #1

1. “How the Teaching Artist can Change the Dynamics of Teaching and Learning”

The education system we are a part of is more like a factory with predetermined outcomes than a pace of freedom and divergence. The art room does not follow that same structure as a science or english class would, and is liberated from the education system’s norms. A teacher who is ALSO an artist is a person who “prizes authentic experience and resists explanatory systems or social structures that render students and teachers as passive receptacles of prepackaged knowledge”(Graham). What an incredible statement this is! The art world is liberating, with room for every one. Students who maybe hate school will feel something different in an art room with an artist-teacher. They can see a living and breathing example of someone who has found meaning through creation outside of the “normal” track of what most students would classify as success. No, while the humble art teacher is usually not a CEO or lawyer or involved in lofty government positions, this does not mean that they are not experiencing their own forms of success.

When students get to know a “real” artist (AKA their teacher) they will see a role-model who can be emulated. It is so important for the art teacher to be engaged, excited, and passionate about art and their students, and create along side them.

How many biology teachers or persuasive writing teachers actually sit down with their students during class time and work on their own essays or theories to research? The art class is a different vein of the school where students can feed off of their teacher’s enthusiasm for the project given because they will see the teacher-artist work along side them. This is sending the message that if a “real” artist thinks this assignment is cool and exciting, then it must really be. The teacher can also influence new types of learning by the environment of the art room. What is on the walls? How are the chairs set up? What will make students feel at home? The art world is vibrant in it’s diversity, something that our educational system tries to squander in the name of success. This poses the question, what really is success? And is there only one way of getting there? 

1. Pick Up Sticks Art Teacher

I love this article. I loved it. So many things I read were thoughts that I have had, or problems I have been pondering, and it was wonderful to read something written by people who have thought about the same things as me! A line that stood out to me in the reading was: “Thinking of teaching as a creative gesture represents a subtle shift from art as object to art as idea”. How profound. I have heard of the struggle of artists trying to keep up their studio and on the side they teach, and what a challenge it is to keep up both lives. If we shift our thinking from art as a physical object to art as an idea, we can include the act of teaching in our artistic process. If I am going to be teaching anyways and doing art on the side, I might as well not waste time and combine the two so they are indistinguishable. 

Another line that I loved was this: “In K-12 schools, it is all too easy to fall back on medium based exercises or modernist ideas that have been codified into lesson plans. the important questions of how artists think and engage with culture, ideas, and questions of life are often ignored in order to get to the final product”. I have been in so many “lazy” art classes where I can tell the teacher has not put any more than 5 minutes into her lesson plan, and 15 maybe for the unit plan. I promise to not be a lazy art teacher, and to not fall back on the “easier” route of doing things. This will take more time, research, and creativity on my part, but isn’t that what making art is all about? Again, echoing the my first paragraph, teaching is art and art is teaching.  “In a world where training in technique is readily available as a YouTube video, my medium expertise might not even be that special. So what experiences does the teaching artist invite into the classroom that cannot be had in any other way?” This makes so much sense. If a student really wanted to learn how to draw horses, they could google it, get a book at Barnes and Noble about it, or watch a video about it. No need for an art teacher. The possibilities of a teaching artist are that they can create experiences. You don’t get the same type of experiences online that you could in a community of learning artists. As a teaching artist, one of my main goals will be to ask myself “What are we doing in class today that they can’t experience anywhere else or in any other way?”. I will try to create a classroom based on experience rather than producing boring art. 

In the end, what a teaching artist means to me is a vibrant, inspiring art maker who’s enthusiasm rubs off on his or her students. The classroom is just another tool to be used in art making, in the way we teach, in the way we provide experiences, and by the way we create art with our students. The art room should be an exciting place to be, one where students AND the art teacher alike count down the hours until it is time to go back again.

1. Teaching with Art21 and Contemporary Artists: Mark Bradford and the Use of Improvisation, Layering, and Text

“Rather than working toward a specific final product or project, we look at how artists describe their own working processes and the ways they play,make changes, assess, rethink, and generally experiment in the service of an idea or inkling”. This to me is such a modern take on the art classroom that involves improvisation. Why is it that the art classroom usually does not follow the pattern or art making used by actual contemporary artists? Why have so many art teachers been focused on projects? Who started this pattern anyways, art teachers or parent or supervisor’s expectations on what an art class should be? Either way, it is liberating to break the mold of what is being done and instead allow for improvisation within art making. After all, this will prepare them more to be “real” artists way more than little art projects with rigid requirements. 

Improvisation in the art room does not mean that it is a chaotic free for all every day, it just means that instead of specific learning goals that all students must meet there are learning possibilities that will emerge based on the needs, ideas, and decisions of the class. There is still a well thought out plan on the teacher’s part, but it is a fluid plan that allows for adaptations. 

1. Spiral Workshop (Drawing)

“Drawing is a trace of human physicality and of human sensibility”. The trace project approaches drawing as something still valid in the world of instant image capturing. They explore marks, messes, rhythms, space, and time as a few unique elements of this type of medium. 

These students explored mark making with their bodies to the beat of a metronome. They had other variable such as duration, beats per minute, mark making tools, one and two handed drawing. Drawing this way allows for the body to take over, not for the artist to know what is going on and what to plan for. 

They moved to more precise drawing forms by using scratchboard to draw images of

the back of their heads, focusing on the details and small textures within hair. This project led them to the next: paint swatch drawing. Students selected a paint swatch from a hardware store, and thought about questions “Who makes up these names?”, “What is being sold along with color”? They then did an automatic writing exercise, where you write continuously without reflection or censoring. Then they took ideas from their free writing about their color swatch and used it to scratch an image into a paint swatch that would challenge or play with it’s name.

Then the students put the paint swatches back with a QR code on the back linking to their website. This is an unconventional way about drawing that is definitely not boring! If I were a student I would much rather do this than drawing an egg or practicing shading for hours upon hours. 

Another way students could draw was by arranging natural elements found in forgotten spaces. Students moved rocks of the same colors into lines, or arranged old bricks in circles, etc. One art activity they did was to get a back of different colored leaves and have 5 mins to create a work of art. 

    Spiral Workshop (Fluidity) Artists in this workshop used drips and stains and spills to create surrealist works. They worked on the ground and tilted and swirled their papers to create more abstract marks. They were then told to find images in the ink drawings. Their next project incorporated this technique but introduced a new element, drawing dried flowers that had been hanging from the ceiling for 2 weeks. Students also completed unfinished fluid portraits and learned about skin tones, and made a water bottle installation about water waste and plastic bottle waste issues. This unit incorporated so much more than drawing with a pencil, instead students were able to explore mark making, fluidity, finding imagery within abstract pieces, and even making a statement about contemporary world issues. Drawing does not have to be boring. 

1. The Puzzle of Motivation (TED Talk by Dan Pink)

"If you want people to work harder, give them an incentive. This actually does just the opposite because it dulls creativity.” The first thing I thought of here in terms of an art room was grades as an incentive to perform. A good grade is the ultimate carrot on a stick for students to just do whatever it takes to get it. Ironically, Dan Pink says, "There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does”. While most businesses reward employees with these carrot-on-a-stick model type incentives, they actually dull creativity and lead to worse performance. If then rewards work really well with a simple set of rules and a determined destination. “As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.” In the art classroom, we should be encouraging students to use cognitive thinking skills, creativity, and thinking outside the box instead of them becoming mechanical robots who produce things based on our specifications. The three ways to overcome this ineffective incentive model all of society uses is to incorporate autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Dan Pink used the example of google employees who are told that for 20% of their work time, they should be doing whatever they want. They can do anything as long as it is not part of their everyday work. More than 1/2 of all of google’s innovations come from this 20% time that employees spend being creative. Why is it then that the current grading system is the one we use to incentivize our students? Who is in charge of this decision? And how can I avoid grades as a carrot-on-a-stick motivator in my own classroom? This is an idea I am just beginning to ponder,  but one idea would be to include google’s 20% time over the stretch of the year’s projects. What if 20% of my projects were just to create something you wanted to? Or what if I shortened it to 20% of class time will be free create time? What happens when during this time kids have no desire to create? What if the school system has broken their creativity already by giving grades out for performance, and when they are told to do whatever they want they will be immobilized? This brought up a lot of ideas that I will continue to think about.