Shoes as Art History

Quentin Blake

In praise of creativity

Chapters 30 and beyond

The Architecture chapter was great- I am teaching a design class this summer and I love the idea of having students design their ideal room or house.
The Craft chapter was interesting. It reminds me that I need to take a look at "Craft" magazine- and someone mentioned there is a tv show too? I had never heard of metal repousse before- it looks like fun.
BUT THE CLAY CHAPTER LOOKS FUNNER! Particularly the plaster reliefs. I love clay.
The practical suggestions for all art classrooms section will be helpful in the future too.
I agree with Rosie. I have very much enjoyed this book, but I am kind of glad to be at the end because my head is full (and I haven't even been teaching full time!)

Chapters 27, 28 & 29

Chapter 28 made me want to make prints. Particularly with glue and aluminum foil.

In Chapter 29 I like the idea of introducing social responsibility into digital media projects. I heard that there is a local art teaching doing i-pod advertisements with their students. Did I hear than in this class? Anyone know anything about it?
I love light-painting on film, like the photo on page 325- but it never would have occured to me to use it as a project with students. The tie-in with drawing is certainly fun.
I was surprised the book introduced video-art- do any local teachers use video in their classes?

Chapter 29
Joe's class with Alvin was doing some fantastic head-pieces with tar paper and paper mache- I think something along those lines would work well with older kids. Masks are always so much fun. And despite our conversation two weeks ago on totem poles. I do have to say that the totem pole project DID look like a great deal of fun. Perhaps there are some ways to modify it.
I also LOVE the bull armature-to full plaster sculpture photo series. As ever it makes me want to make art, which really is one of the best things you can say about something.

Chapters 25-26

No- wait! maybe THIS is my favorite chapter. I want to marry painting too.
All of his suggestions for working with kids and paint seem very practical and helpful.
I would pay a great deal of money for the painting on page 286.
Are there many painting kits used in the district? Painting is always so messy, I'm curious about how the painting kits and lessons are constructed. It's too bad the lessons are so short. I would so love to see more murals. That might make a great artist in the schools project.
The section on Mosaics and collages is fascinating. I want to try these projects. I have done little to no collage work and it looks like great fun, particularly for underwater subjects as mentioned in the text.

Chapters 23-24

I LOVE drawing. LOVE it. I want to marry it. This might just be my favorite chapter.
I am particularly excited about the idea of having students draw maps and diagrams from their life. Has anyone done this? I would love to see what the young ones would do when asked about how our insides work. All of the life/figure/portrait drawing ideas are also exciting.
I love the John Dewey quote "The roots of art and beauty are in the basic vital functions, the biological commonplaces man shares with birds and beasts". We should really have the kids at the musuem draw more- or at least sent them back to their class with a mounted Ptarmigan or some such animal to draw.

I really haven't used crayons much. I do have to say I was surprised to like the construction paper crayons as much as I did. They're high pigment content is great. Did any of you ever do the crayon engraving in school? I want to try it. I remember doing the crayon resist and also the crayon encaustic- which was a disaster.

Chapter 22

Art criticism with youngsters makes me a bit nervous. I’m always afraid that their “critiquing brain” will get ahead of their “art-making brain” and thus they will only have critical things to say about their work before it even gets off the ground. That being said, I learned a few things from this chapter. It was nice to have the author come right out and say that you shouldn’t try and do a college-art class critique with elementary students. I found the sequential breakdown of questions to ask kids (on pages 236-237) quite helpful. Some of our docents (from a science background) at the museum really hate doing the tour of the art gallery and I think I might photocopy those pages to give them a sense of how to ask the kids questions.

The aesthetic questions (pages 241-243) are also somewhat helpful. All of this is just such a shift from the way art was talked about for my last three years at CalArts . I’m not quite comfortable with either way. I know that that is not very articulate. I just became pretty disillusioned with the art-world speak, I found it to be over-analyzed, navel-gazing and all together a bunch of hooey and I really don’t want that to happen to kids. I don’t want them to think that they are stupid or unartistic because they “don’t get it”. I think all of these questions are great- just as long as they don’t subtract too much from the limited art-making time that the kids get.

I think all this will become clearer once I actually start observing elementary art classes.

Oh- and one more thing- I like the idea of the "observing game" mentioned on page 236. Has anyone ever done this before?

Chapters 20-21

Since the beginning of this class I have been interested to hear more about the idea of how to lead a critique for elementary students. And while this chapter is on teaching art appreciation- it still brings up the same issues of analyzing a work of art. So many students have low confidence in their artistic abilities anyway, that I am nervous about teaching them to scrutinize works of art for fear that they will scrutinize themselves out of making art entirely because their head has advanced more than their hands. Several comments in this chapter have helped me relax about this issue and become less fearful.
Firstly, I like the quote from Maria Montessori “do not give more to the mind than to the hand”. I also found the breakdown of suggestions for how to lead art discussions quite helpful. The little bit I have read from the “Talking with children about art” book has been helpful along the same lines. I recently checked out a book for my illustrator project that is called “tell me a picture”. Also quite helpful to break down into little steps how to talk to children about art.
In my job at the Museum, I have a great deal of fun talking with kids about science, but when I take them up to the art gallery it becomes more difficult for me. It just feels so vague, and I often I get the feeling the kids make up answers that they think I will like rather than putting much thought into it. I have been trying to think how to re-phrase my questions better. I think I can use some of these guidelines to practice.

On the topic of art games, does anyone know of any art related computer games? Something like where in the world is Carmen san Diego only about art? That’s a real market nich I would think. I’d buy it for my kids.

I liked the specificity of the art history discussions in chapter 21. I am teaching a life drawing class for high school students down in California this summer and I will make use of some of the suggested artists to show work from.

Cape Dorset Prints

So the place I was thinking of was Cape Dorset (on Baffin Island in Canada) It's an inuit community of I think around 1000 people at the most and yet, at least in the 60's they were producing an incredible number of prints. I found a book on the Cape Dorset artists in the library at CalArts in California and fell in love with their work. I'm not so hot about the more recent work I found on the web. But at least the older stuff I think is worth a look.

Chapters 8, 10, 11, 12 & 13

Ooof. There was a lot of information in these chapters. The actual number of pages was short, but it has given me a lot to think about. The math chapter was great but I found the science chapter REALLY exciting. I would like to do some of the projects with my classes up at the museum.
Chapter 12 (on children with special needs) will prove to be a great resource for me in the future. I have very limited experience working with children with special needs and I found the “general teaching strategies” section very helpful.
Chapter 13 (on gifted students)
I have always been uncomfortable with the “gifted and talented” category for exactly the same reasons mentioned on page 139, that the test for intelligence is highly weighted towards aptitude in math and reading, so I appreciated that this chapter addressed that issue. I really need to read Howard Gardener’s books. And once again, I found the section addressing teaching strategies quite helpful.

Chapter 9

I had to read this chapter over several times because some of the concepts were new to me, and honestly some of them made me a little uncomfortable. Some of the children’s art DID indeed seem somewhat stereotyping. I found both Rosie’s and Joe’s comments very articulate and perceptive and my thoughts feel very clunky in comparison. I haven’t had any actual experience teaching kids social studies in conjunction with art , so maybe that is why I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around some of the issues addressed in this chapter. Really most of it seems like common sense but I am wrestling with the idea Rosie brought up about “How do you help students understand some basic tenants of a culture AND simultaneously free up the cultural boundaries? “. I think perhaps kids learn best about other cultures by having friends who belong to other cultural backgrounds. But I’m not sure how that observation relates to teaching in a group setting. A teacher has little control over the diversity of their classroom. This chapter did have many great ideas for projects- that for me might have been the most helpful part of it. Also- I’m curious to hear more about Rosie’s multicultural research.

Chapters 6-7

I was very interested in the discussion of the “affective” domain discussed in chapter 6. It tied into some ideas brought up in chapter 7- particularly the idea of students keeping illustrated journals. Children’s work is so strong when they draw from their own life. Also I tend to forget how much children need to move. It was good to be reminded of this. At work today the students were learning about dinosaurs at the museum and the lesson plan has them put on a dinosaur play/dance at the end to synthesize what they had learned. I thought it was sort of a silly idea at first, that the kids would think it was stupid. but I was wrong. They loved it. The lesson plans that were created for the museum workshops with kids all seem to follow the cognitive/affective/psychomotor structure. I have been impressed by how well designed and effective they are.

I continue to find the children’s art in the book exciting. Particularly jumping frogs on pg 61,.and the snowy scene on page 71. Also the quilts. They make me want to take up quilting.

Chapters 3-5

The imaginary roosters are extraordinary. I would love to try that assignment. Maybe with dinosaurs though.
There were many exciting ideas in these three chapters, many of which overlap with our discussion in class last week, so I won’t bore you by listing them out.
The main thing I can’t help but thinking about is the advantages of an art teacher staying put in one room rather than traveling around. I am very much looking forward to hearing what Rosie and (new momma!) Stephanie have to say about their experiences. I’m a little disappointed that music gets an hour a week and art gets 3 hours a year. Do you feel that the kids suffer from this?

Chapters 1 & 2

I was so inspired by (the author) Frank Wachowaik's philosophy of teaching art that I interlibrary loaned several of his published papers. I would be happy to xerox them for anyone in class who is interested.

A summary of Frank Wachowaik's teaching philosophy.
1. Art is not something special done by special people. It is part of our everyday life.
2. Allowing all mark-making and visual statements children make to qualify as art limits their sense of art rather than encourages it.
3. "When art plays a subordinate roll to other subjects, or is limited to stereotypical holiday decorations, it cannot perform a vital role in children’s creative growth"
4. Children need substantial time devoted to art every week. Most art that is created in a limited time period is apt to be cursory and sterile. It takes 45 minutes to motivate and inspire the kids and do the preliminary drawings for a project. A fully finished project takes 3, 4, or 5 sessions.

Three other ideas I found exciting
-have the project let the student “say something” about their friends, pet, selves or world.
-idea of using role playing (ex. students are graphic designers charged with creating an ad for an ecological cause)
-drawing from a taxidermy animal (ex. owl)
Also I enjoyed our classroom management/organization discussion in class. All of the specifics such as "give instructions before you pass out materials' were very helpful but the part that I have been thinking about the most was the idea of speaking to the best self of the child.