maria pairitz's
community of teachers portfolio
ix. learning from others
As an educator, it is important for me to provide students with opportunities to learn from each other because individuals in modern society are expected to work cooperatively with others towards common goals. In the art class, learning from others is critical to developing technical and conceptual art making skills. Art is an ongoing collaboration between the artist, their medium, and outside influences, so learning how to collaborate is essential.
The evidence I have compiled demonstrate my ability to engage students in instructing/mentoring other students and facilitating group work that enables students to produce a collaborative product. Pieces of evidence I have collected include a collaborative project for AP Drawing/2D, strategies for creating a classroom environment and atmosphere that promotes student collaboration, readings on learning from others through copying, a collaborative project for my 2nd and 3rd graders, an online critique for AP, my CoT Community Shuffle Lesson Plan, and excerpts from my journal.
These pieces of evidence are important because they have allowed me to develop teaching techniques and strategies that enhance students' collaborative efforts. As a previously introverted student who hated group work, these experiences have helped me learn to value the educational and social importance of working well with others for my students. I plan to be more explicit about the benefits of group work so that individuals who hate group work understand more clearly why I make them participate anyway.
I will use these experiences and resources in my future teaching. I have assessed and reflected on my methods of facilitating learning from others and will capitalize on what was successful and what I might need to modify. The AP Class Yearbook project is being used for AP again this year. I plan on restructuring the lesson to provide even more time for feedback from, planning, and trouble shooting with peers.
A pattern I observed in my experiences facilitating learning from others is that all of the group products are individual works that come together as the final product. None of my projects are worked on simultaneously by all peers in a synchronous fashion but rather each individual creates a unique piece with the end goal of working within the whole. I also make an effort to coordinate one on one peer instructing when a student has been absent or needs extra help instead of re-teaching it myself.
Overall, I believe I have demonstrated my ability to facilitate collaborative learning experiences. I do hope to create more explicitly group based projects in the future as I can see that I may have missed opportunities for more in depth student collaboration. I do, however, value and recognize the educational and social importance of helping form students that are capable of working cooperatively towards a common goal. At this time I believe I have reached Substantial Progress for this expectation.
AP Class Yearbook Project
AP Drawing/2D is a year long course in which students independently create a body of work focused on a certain theme or concentration unique to them. As this class is highly individualized and self-motivated, it is sometimes more difficult for students to learn from each other as they are so sucked into their own work. For this reason, I created this end of year project. AP submits their portfolios about 3 weeks before the end of the semester, so they have a lot of dead time afterwards. This project was created not only to fill that gap of time, but also provide opportunity for students to reflect on their experience as a whole group of individuals. The Class Yearbook Project assigns students to a peer and asks them to create a portrait of their assigned peer incorporating elements, techniques, and styles that were present in their own and their peer's portfolio. Students had to collaborate, looking at their peer's portfolio more critically and learning their techniques to incorporate into their final piece. They had to create several thumbnail sketches and take them to their peer to receive input as well as receive input during a midpoint critique. This lesson was successful in getting students outside of the box they've been in all year to learn from their peers and what they have learned over the course of the year.
Classroom Layout
Classroom layout can make or break opportunities for students to learn from each other. At Fishers, each art classroom is purposefully arranged in a way that encourages discussion and collaboration among peers. For example, the pottery wheels are lined up side by side and across from each other in the ceramics room. Wheel throwing is especially difficult to master as there are many complex steps, so what we often see is one student excel at raising the walls but struggle with centering and opening while another may be really good at centering, but have trouble raising the walls. This provides opportunity for a student to lean over to their neighbor and ask them for help if they notice the individual is doing a good job. We also assign wheel partners since there are not enough wheels for everyone to be on them at once. Wheel partners are expected to observe their partner throwing so they can gain insights from them and also provide feedback and assistance with certain steps.
Aside from the wheels, the ceramics and most other art rooms have tables for four students to sit across each other. Working in small groups even during independent projects allows students to discuss and work through individual problems that might come up during the course of their work. This is another perfect opportunity for collaboration and for observing and learning from peers work. Even if the seats are individual artists desks, they are arranged in a way that allows for classroom discussion and opportunities to learn from others.
Although written while observing early elementary students, Social Learning and Drawing seeks to dispel the stigma art teachers have formed against students copying other students' artworks. The idea is that we, as teachers, "must acknowledge benefits of a classroom learning community in which students interact, help, and push each other to improve their work," which I believe applies to any level of art education.
In my own observations at Fishers, I have noticed similar themes or techniques among projects among table groups and class periods. Often, a student observes another student working and thinks their project is aesthetically or conceptually pleasing and then attempts to apply similar qualities in their own work. This is usually done under the radar or subconsciously as the student does not want to appear being a copy cat. Or they are swayed from even attempting the same techniques or ideas in fear of being a copy cat or cheating. There is so much pressure on students in high school to create original works of art, when really, still at the beginning of their art education, they should be copying and learning from not only each other but other professional artists and masters. This is how they build the skills and techniques and learn how to create conceptually challenging compositions that they can apply to their own work later in life. Laroche writes, "Gombrich (1956) insisted that an artist needs a formula, a schema, from which to begin. The artist then modifies the schema that he has learned through imitation to suit his expressive intentions" (pg. 22). As I am more interested in the process than the product, I have encouraged students to "copy" ideas and strategies by showing examples of student work presently in the class and from the past. Gretchen noted this strategy in her observation on April 13th, 2018 (read Gretchen's notes HERE).
I have made several comparisons from the Laroche writing to the graphic novel Steal Like an Artist. I definitely would recommend this book to any students and would offer them to borrow it in my own class because it breaks the connection between original = creative. Nothing is original. Everything is influenced by everything. So embrace it. This book provides strategies to its readers for collecting ideas and remixing and adapting them to create your own work. Kleon writes, "the reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds". He also clarifies the line between stealing in terms of plagiarizing, ripping off, or discrediting and stealing in terms of studying, copying, and applying/transforming what you've learned into your own art.
These two texts are important for me as a future educator because I don't want students to feel the pressure or burden to not only learn new techniques but also create a completely original work of art. I know when I was a student, it was difficult for me to get started on any projects because I thought artists look at a blank page and see exactly what the end product will be when that's just not true. Artists collaborate. They learn from other artists, peers, writers, nature, music, visual culture, etc. My goal is to create an environment where students feel free to learn form each other, and if that involves copying strategies and techniques and "stealing" ideas from one another, then I've accomplished my goal.
Adinkra Inspired Collaborative Textile
I prepared this lesson for 2nd and 3rd graders for Saturday Art School but could honestly see myself adapting this project for high school students in an Intro to 2D or Printmaking course. In this lesson, students looked at and talked about line and positive and negative space in traditional Adinkra cloths; identified common symbols in visual culture, and then created an original symbol to add to our class textile using a relief printmaking technique. This project was a successful in allowing students to work cooperatively towards completing a final product. It is also interesting to make comparisons between their cooperative efforts as students in an art class and the cooperative effort of the Ashanti peoples in producing these textiles which involves people who produce the dye, carve the stamps from calabash, and print on the cloth. I think high school students would appreciate the opportunity to work on a single class product like this.
With a few peers from Alpha, we created a project for CoT's Community Shuffle. We decided to do a bottle cap mural to promote recycling and being environmentally conscious in a collaborative and engaging way. We met during class and developed a lesson plan and then assigned jobs to help pull together the materials necessary. We all collected bottle caps from around campus and at recycling centers. I painted a large board for the bottle caps to be glued on so there was a template and the other two brought glue guns. Then, the mural itself was a collaboration between two groups of peers from other seminar groups who came in and glued the bottle caps to the board. People who came to our community shuffle project may have a few friends from the same seminar, but a majority were meeting new peers from the other seminar groups. This activity not only promoted Alpha's focus of an environmentally conscious curriculum, but allowed the opportunity for peers to talk to each other and get to know one another while creating a mural together.
CANVAS Critique: AP Drawing/2D
I developed and implemented this online critique after I brought up concerns I had about the fact that my mentor does not do classroom critiques after projects. Critiques are a crucial part of learning from others in any art class and an important part of the creative process for students. It is critical to helping students learn to communicate their ideas and process effectively to others and allows student input that the teacher or student artist may not have thought of. Unfortunately, Ms. O feels that in order to allow enough time for them to work on their projects, she is forced to cut out critiques because it would take at least two class periods per project to get through everyones' artworks. I suggested that instead of an in class critique we create an online critique through Canvas so we can keep that critical aspect of art making without sacrificing in class work time. She thought this was a great idea and allowed me to implement it.
This online critique allowed students to receive feedback from peers in a safe and engaging platform. All comments are tagged with their names and I can see all of them so this ensures that hurtful or non-relevant comments are a non-issue. While the online critique was a success, drawbacks include a lack of face to face interaction between students. A conversation online is much different than in class. It's harder to build off of each other's ideas, especially if you're only concerned with earning your points and don't take the time to read comments on other pieces and respond just because you have an idea or connection, not because you're required to. So I don't believe online critique should REPLACE in class critique, but possibly using the online critique for half the projects and in class critique for the other half so students are getting the benefits of learning from others for each project regardless.
Journal Excerpts
Today Ms. O demonstrated how to solder metal together so I observed her demonstration. She does demonstrations in small groups based on the progress of the students. If a chunk of three or four are ready to move on to a step she has not demonstrated yet she will show those students. Then the next wave of students when they reach that point. Sometimes if there is only one student ready for a demonstration and she has already demonstrated the technique to a group previously, then she might ask a student who she knows has it locked down to show the one student. Peer demonstrations are great because they help the demonstrator feel more confident and teaching a process helps ingrain little details that might slip away if you don't have to say the steps out loud or make sure someone else is getting all the steps correct. Even though I had only done it once last year, I felt confident after reviewing my skills in the first period and helped a student with an intricate piece in second period.
Today I learned how to rivet in Jewelry 1. Ms. O had a student in the class show me. She seemed timid at first and said she wasn't the best, but I think teaching me the process helped strengthen her own understanding and boost her self-confidence. A lot of the books I'm reading in my methods course suggest that peer-teaching or having a student demonstrate a technique they know or came up with to their peers or the teacher, helps students reinforce their own skills and develops classroom community. I often see students taking it upon themselves to demonstrate a technique or help a peer through a problem at their table groups. Anyway, riveting is super hard. And then Ms. O taught me how to patina my work to add contrast or emphasis. I'm liking how my little raccoon is turning out!