JOURNAL #8
#OurLearningPaths
JOURNAL #8
3/25/22
During the course of our Brainy tours at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, I spent a lot of time planning my route and what I was going to say. I was trying my best to make my tour fun for the fourth graders and I came up with the topic of following different ways that animals were portrayed and how that relates to identity and culture. At the museum however, almost immediately my well intentioned plans started changing... The order in which I presented the artwork had changed in order to be flexible with the other teachers as not to crowd space. During the tours, I got a lot of feedback from my students in real time. One of the biggest comments was made by my second group, they were sad that they didn't get to see the rest of the museum. Because they finished their art project so quickly, in our time left over we were able to quickly walk them through all the exhibits so that they could see a little bit of the rooms that were not covered in my tour. From then on I asked my remaining groups, "Would you like to walk through the rest of the museum on our way back to do the activity?"
Every group said, "YES!"
I utilized the interpretive strategies that Hubbard mentions as well as the visual thinking strategies (VTS) quite a bit in my tour. I tried to ask pointed questions that got the students thinking but also participating in their own learning, self discovery and relationships to the artwork. Some of my questions lead to surprising answers. For example, when we looked at the Maasai jewelry, I asked the students, "What sorts of jewelry in our culture tell us something about another person?" Many of the students said "wedding ring" but there were a lot of students that mentioned friendship bracelets or necklaces. I was surprised at the amount of personal experiences surfaced in our discussions; the students were able to relate the art to their personal lives and stories.
The first big difference between a classroom environment and that of the museum was how the students conduct themselves. In the museum, there is a preciousness to the art and space; we have to be mindful of the work, our physicality and actions to a level that is different that the classroom. Also, the museum is a public space, this adds a level of public self awareness to our tours. I am not their usual teacher, but a guest educator. This can be challenging on multiple levels. We don't have an established relationship, so we must build trust quickly. Being in a new public space and experiencing new and different stimuli can be exciting and fun, which poses a challenge to being able to keep still and aware of their physical space. Changing the group's position to sitting helped both with excitedness and trust. Our physical positions and body language can change how students perceive the tour.
Another difference is being able to see original artwork. Students are able to see the work in real life and experience it allowing them an intimacy with how it is made, it's actual size, etc, in a way that they couldn't analyse it from a book or projected slide.
The most challenging part of the tours was how to balance individual personalities. The participants in one of my groups wanted to all explore different art works and go in different directions. Most of my groups had more dominant participants, while others were more shy. Learning how to draw out the shy ones, or keep a group unified that has different interests was challenging. By asking personal questions, and keeping up with their interests in a honest and genuine way, I could begin to unify and equalize participation. The use of their names during the tour helped with engagement and unification as well. They were not nameless persons, but valued individual participants.
During the tour, I personally felt like I was learning how to let go. How we feel the lesson should go and being present to how it's actually progressing is a challenging skill. It is sometimes hard to release those ideas of the lesson that you spent such a long time planning. Learning how to think on my feet with my groups, listening to their responses and interests allowed them to be in control of their learning (and they were!) I then could then step into the roll of an informed guide, being focused on listening and asking questions while ready and prepared with information and knowledge.
For my art piece, I choose an illustrative style. For each of my four tours, I plotted each group's physical path through the museum. I made the path into an image of a snake, because I have been relating the symbol of the snake to my path of learning to be an educator. (See Journal #1) I've added representative images from each art piece that was a part of my tour and connected them with "beaded" lines. The beads seem to be originating from and related to the Maasai necklace. This was the key art piece that I used to formulate my art project related to identity. For my art project, I choose to make beaded keychains. I wanted to connect an everyday object in our culture with the idea of identity and rite of passage. I asked questions like, "When someone has many keys, what might that tell you about them?" and "When you get a set of keys, what will that mean to you?"
On each of the snakes, you can see a little round mark where I stopped to talk about one of the works of art on my tour. You can see that the last group (blue snake) got to talk about all six pieces and was the most active as far as how much of the museum we were able to cover. Plotting them out in this way showed me how much my tours changed over the course of the events, and a large part of this was in response to my students.
The more I work with students, the more I am challenged to be as prepared as possible and yet flexible with my lessons. The benefit of this is to keep the students engaged, interested and in control of their learning; relating their experiences and trusting me as their guide. They are not lost, but tethered by the lesson and guided exploration. We are there together to discover, learn and ask questions.
During this class so far, I've learned so much about my own art making and different ways of teaching. One of my biggest fears when I started this journey was that I wouldn't find new ways of teaching that fit with who I was naturally. Now I know that there are so many different techniques to explore and a lot of them do feel natural and can be tailored and modified to best fit teacher and student. In this class, the introduction of big ideas and meaning making help me to consider what we want to say separately of technique. We've also explored the great value of our failures. All of which to say, that there are many successful combinations to answer, "How do you teach?" and many ways to bring art learning to every student.
In some ways this has allowed me to explore and extend these graces and practices to myself and my own art; practicing what I teach and healing my own art making practice.
Process photos of the artwork and images of teaching, projects, kids and talks:
