LTC 8740 - Day 2

A Popplet of Chapter 3

                    

“Not only do artists feed the consciousness of others; the work artists engage in feeds their own consciousness.” (P 69) I love that we experienced this today in our chair drawing exercise.  Just as Eisner says, we dealt with materials albeit simple ones, made judgments and comparisons of our quick sketches, and reflected on the choices that we made. Being paired with similar chair drawers afforded the opportunity to consider what made us envision that particular chair. And, as Eisner says, here I am hours later still contemplating, still wondering, and contemplating the way I could use a similar activity with my own students.

As I read Chapter 3, again, I kept a running mental tab, evaluating my own strengths and weaknesses. I mentally applauded that just last week I purged almost all of my old examples, files, and lesson plans. After thirteen years I no longer felt comfortable feeling comfortable. I laughed when I read, “The surest road to hell in a classroom is to stick to the lesson plan, no matter what.” (P 48) Who hasn’t traveled that path at least once? Doggedly determined to make it work when you know beyond reasonable doubt, that it’s just not going to, but #$@* it, you’re doing it anyway.

Chapter 4 What the Arts Teach and How it Shows

Before identifying the cognitive abilities students are likely to develop as a result of studying in and through the arts Eisner introduces four forces that affect what students learn:

·      The experience of working through the activity and with the materials

·      The connections the teacher establishes

·      The thinking that is promoted and / or discouraged

·      The climate of the classroom, or in Eisner’s terms, the ambiance

What the arts teach:

·      Attention to relationships – how do the parts relate to the whole

·      Flexible purposing – the ability to see work as a conversation, to pursue unexpected outcomes as a result of thought and feeling.

·      Using materials as mediums –using skillful thought and sensitivity to guide technique.

·      Shaping form to create expressive content – the ability to evoke an emotional response as a result of manipulating a medium.

·      The exercise of imagination – developing the capacity to see the world in unexpected ways, to ponder ‘what if?’

·      Learning to frame the world from an aesthetic perspective – making sense of the world through the frame of an artistic lens.

·      The ability to transform qualities of experience into speech and text – the freedom to use speech, written and / or spoken to describe their need noticing, and to acquire an understanding of “art as a cultural artifact.” (P 89)

It has been years since I seriously paused to consider what the arts teach. It’s something I do 184 days of the year and as one of my classmates mentioned, I know it’s about more than making pretty things to hang on the wall! This chapter offers some valuable advocacy tools, most of which fall right in line with the Common Core, and STEAM.

I got hung up on “Materials become media when they mediate.” (P 80) Then, being the jester that I am, I got side-tracked wondering what other words would work if I used that sentence structure as a fill in the blanks response with the rule being that all of the words had to start with the same letter. __________ becomes __________ when they _____________. My own little imagination spark!

Chapter 2 Finding Meaning in Aesthetics (Freedman)

Freedman offers a background in the history of meaning in aesthetics, and offers a serious argument for understanding aesthetics in Visual Culture today. A great deal of this chapter is concerned with the origins of formalism and the lack of their relevance to post modern art and post modern viewers of art.

 My district is guilty of being very formalist with art curriculum. As both Freedman and Eisner have noted, schools tend to seek out a magic / scientific equation for making education work. They fail to take into account the fact that this model is highly ineffective, and that human beings bring humanness into the balance.

Barrett –

“Whether art seems confounding or readily understandable, it has potential for provoking and sustaining interesting interpretations. (Principles for Interpreting Art p 2)” As I read the Barrett articles last night the words “delicate dance” kept bubbling to the surface. It’s so important that we impart these skills to our students, that they learn what it takes to become good interpreters. They must be able to make sense of the images / art that they encounter, and they must have the tools for understanding the interpretations of others.  One of my most favorite all time quotes is from the Smith-Shank book, Semiotics And Visual Culture: Sights, Signs, And Significance introduction - "un-interrogated responses to visual input are dangerous to democracy." Does it get any more important than that?