In crafting this lesson, my primary goal was to help build literacy within student’s art practice. I wanted to help them be able to draw a linear connection between their emotions, their own way of communicating, their lives, and how they chose to represent it. My working Big Idea for the project was “To communicate a personal message or idea through the use of creative thinking and literacy”. In my placement I worked with kids from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures with drastically different lifestyles. I wanted to help bolster the meaning behind the work that they work making and the artistic decisions they made. By having the students focus on personal aspects of their own life, as well as continuing education about how formal elements work to communicate in an artwork, students, even if they chose to abstract their topic, were able to reach a proficient level of literacy in their communication while pushing themselves technically and artistically to meet their goals. Part of my inspiration for this project was Paulo Freire’s article, The Importance of the Act of Reading”, where Paulo talks about his experience learning how “read” different aspects of life, such as the complexity of birds chirping and the melody of the wind. I wanted to help students begin to understand how we can, as Friere states, begin reading the world and not reading the word”, understanding the objects around us and our experiences as texts that we can dive into and understand. By mechanically making art without thought in school, we subject kids to only reading the surface of possibilities. And, as Freire states,“that is why reading a text taken as a pure description of an object... and undertaken to memorize the description, is neither real reading, nor does it result in knowledge of the object to which the text refers” (Freire 9). When I was creating this lesson I attempted to have a “ground-up” method for developing literacy. A lot of students understand the technical aspects of the medium they work with, but I want to push them to take their thinking to a higher level; to acknowledge and highlight their intention and desire to portray certain things in their art. The first week of the lesson was dedicated to developing visual language. In this week students were given warmups where they were asked to explain particular emotions or ideas using clay in a short time span. By giving a finite time span allows students to take their first ideas at face value and elaborate on them with a written component that was attached as well. Additionally in this first week, we examined words to help describe different aspects of art. Students were given a visual language vocabulary sheet which was designed to help give ideas about how they could represent formal elements (for example, a jagged line, or a busy composition). This week was designed to help prime student’s thinking to help break some of the preconceived notions of what Art is and how artists use process to create. This week was followed up with a week of ideation, where students use the literacy tools they have acquired along with doing some exercises to help the students understand what is important to their lives. These are the everyday aspects that they could interpret in a new context or more in depth to use as a way to explore in my own words, “things that fuel you to be who you are, whether those are positive or negative”. These sketches lead directly into construction of the forms, and the students are able to use their attuned visual language skills to help comprehensively delve into the world around them. Reference: Freire, Paulo, and Loretta Slover. “The Importance of the Act of Reading.” The Journal of Education, vol. 165, no. 1, 1983, pp. 5–11. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42772842. Accessed 16 Apr. 2020.
Future Resources for Students: Wasily Kandinsky,Point and Line to Plane, Paulo Freire and Loretta Slover, "The importance of the Act of Reading", 1983, www.jstor.org/stable/42772842 Art as Text: Bridging Literacy and the Arts , https://www.edutopia.org/video/art-text-bridging-literacy-and-arts