Week #9 Comments

Jon

I also love where he turned the situation into an opportunity for them to be honest with themselves and each other.  Telling what is going on in their real lives. Seeing that each of us has a problem and that within the group setting there might be an answer or someone else going through the same thing.  This is just another tool for us teacher to understand his or her students.

We, as teachers, do have to be the people in this observation, plus have feelings or showing feelings to each and every student.  Also, remember that there are always needs, regardless if they are your own or your students.  Finding ways to be there for them is what a great teacher can do for his or her students.

Annette

Tom Shadyac, the director, has a documentary called “I AM”. It came out in 2010 and talks about what is wrong with our world and how we can improve both it and the way we live in it. The move has some very interesting questions that ask us to open our minds to new possibilities and to understand each other and come together as a group and develop or renew our communities, have kinship, and interconnecting humanity back together.  He also talks about the way we are on the path to separating ourselves from each other. Rethinking of ways to get back to the way we need to come together and create a different world. I think this might be a great opportunity for yours students to reflect on their negativity within the classroom and world.

Annette, I would love to add some words to your list.  These come to my mind when I think of a teacher. Some are: caring, mentor, coach, sounding board, performer, and friend.

Teaching as if Life Matters:

Did being in the school environment or a teacher wound me? Well let’s see from the question on page xii.

·      “The belief that you are not smart, not competent in learning”. I do feel that every student, no matter what school you went to, will have these feeling and its just part of being human. We question why and what we do.

     “The belief that your abilities are fixed and cannot be improved with effort, coaching, intervention, or self-understanding”. No, I do not feel that my abilities are fixed or can't be improved upon. I'm learning every minute of the day and my abilities change every week. Every year there are always exciting things new to discover. It’s even exciting to find things that, we as human beings, are always adapting to find new ways that can change within our environment.  The human soul needs this to be able to grow, so that we understand who we were, are, and where we're going.

      “Painful memories of shaming experiences in school that lives on in you as generalized anxiety and a low appetite for intellectual risk taking”. I don't like to speak in public because I was teased for how I spoke.  I couldn't pronounce all the words correctly and it did affect me, but that is something that I'm trying to overcome. I still speak in public, even though it makes me nauseous, and I have a hard time doing it.  It’s something that I’m striving  to overcome everyday.

      ”A tendency to classify others, and yourself, into dualistic, reductive categories: “smart/dumb,’’artistic/not artistic”. Of course, I sometimes classify myself as non-artistic or not smart enough, I think we all go through this.

   

          “A generalized loss of pleasure in learning. Of course, I find a loss in pleasure when doing artwork.  It depends on what's going on my life, and if the artwork is not going right. I can't think through it or get it done.  We all lose that pleasure of play that we have in the artwork from time to time.

  

      “And finally, unprocessed feelings about education and learning that you enact as an adult in your interactions with your own children or students”. I have a feeling that we all have memories of teachers that we didn't like.  Maybe something happened and we interacted with them negatively or were scolded in the classroom.  Many students carry these memories throughout their adult lives and retain a bad impression of education into their adulthood.

    

      “It is the communication and listening skills, more than anything else, that determine the quality of her recommend habits of mind (dualistic thinking, labeling, judging, blaming) create communication styles that lead to separation and dysfunction in our relationships.” Wow, what a powerful statement! Assisted if we don't have communication with our students how are we supposed to determine if they are succeeding. If we are succeeding in the creation of a lifelong relationship in their learning, we have to have communication.  If not, this is where dysfunctional labeling and blaming comes from.  We need to really think about what we're saying to our students.

On page 124 “Transcending Fear: The Practice of Truthspeaking”. I have been on both sides of this story. Being the teacher and not knowing why your students haven't done their homework or what is behind that reason.  It makes you so angry to be a teacher sometimes. I have also been on the student side where you're overwhelmed. You feel like you're sinking. The statement right there really, JUMPED OFF THE PAGE for me. Because, I always feel like I'm below the waterline and can't even grab or hold onto something to save me. You know that place, where you have so much homework and so much going on in your life that you don't see an end to it all.  You might feel like you're so behind and try to catch up you feel like you are getting behind. What a powerful message this is for anybody that has been in the same place. We all need to reconnect with what is going on in each other’s lives, before we make judgments. If it’s our students, or if we are the teacher, we need to be able to relate to each other to understand or have empathy. Without all of this how can we become better teachers? I had to share that in that section of the book I was amazing and moving to me.

Reflection Log #1.1

Week 8 Commets

Clayton

I’m in love with the layering that is going on within your piece.  All of those vibrant colors and different imagery you have incorporated into your portrait is amazing. It shows what is going on inside of you.  The way you have incorporated all this different imagery helps in representing yourself to us.

Art needs to have discomfort within itself. That uncomfortable place is what we need to learn. We need to make whatever is in our minds and see the change or see it in other ways. Its what comes from that uncomfortable place that helps us change or changes the work. It's a great place to discover something new. In Kathy's class we talked about how “play” can help in that uncomfortable place. This is where an artist’s work can change, you might want to thinking about that within your work.

Ashley

Sometimes we have to step outside of what makes us comfortable and find new ways to make art. The use of cardboard is a great project.  Your students, from the way you talked about them in this post, would probably, love to do a unit on cardboard artists. I have seen some of the most amazing artwork come from cardboard. I have a question for you Ashley. Would you use this experience and make this project in your own classroom? Here is a website of five artists working with cardboard. This might help if you wanted to integrate this into your lesson with your students.

http://weburbanist.com/2008/11/28/cardboard-art-and-sculptures/

Week 8: Artist, Teaching, and Students with muppet me. Lol

"Muppet me" 

is made out of thread on the sewing machine by using a free motion sewing.

Week 7: Playing, Creativity, Possibility; & New School Art Styles: the Project of Art Education; Post Modern Principles:

Jon, What if you don’t make art ever again? 

Discomfort is where we grow.  It’s the place that makes us feel different. It’s where we want to change and make things better. So if you have to boil it down to something, make sure you are enjoying the process and letting that process find a new home with new meaning. We all have a hard time being the one in front of the group. I have a very difficult time being there. Time will give us the confidence to show that we are great artists/teachers for our students. So Jon if you are doing this for yourself and for your art, then please do not let anything get in your way!

Ashley, Great Video

Student led projects can be some of the most meaningful things that a group of young people can do together. They learn to find ways to communicate with each other and find self worth that lives with them throughout life.

Right now I’m doing a project that has the student led curriculum for the semester that starts off with them brainstorming with what they want to change in their school, community or world.  This would be a great project for Mississippi students to rethink and remake their own community into something better in the long-run. Teaching them to grow and to help themselves.

Olivia Gude interview, she talks about playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X56zkWfXCUo

Playing, Creativity, Possibility:

 The very first paragraph between the teacher and her student goes right to why PLAY needs to be in the classroom.  ANXIETY “I don’t know what to do,” Jane responds when told to get down to work. “It’s easy,” the teacher says for the 27th time today. “Just think of things that don’t go together and put them in your painting.” The student whines, “I can’t think of anything.” The frustrated (and exhausted) teacher offers a plethora of suggestions that are each met with a disconsolate sigh.”

Suggesting what a student should do without showing it to them first, through the interaction of play, can stop us all. I know that, for me, when I start a new project that I have never explored before, it is hard to begin if we don’t understand where the work might go. For me, I like to PLAY around with different ideas, materials and see what can work until I find what the work is telling me. I would also have a huge amount of anxiety trying to work in that environment.

We have to surrender to the process of making art through play, creativity and the imagination that each of us has. When did we lose that in our lives? As artists I think we try to hold on to that and that’s why some artists are never serious about life. They are committed to their art, but are they committed to themselves? We as teachers need to nurture that part inside of each student to allow them to surrender to the artist within them so that they can develop a creative soul and hold on to them self’s.

Michael an artist uses candles and smoke to create his artwork:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2552354/The-incredible-paintings-created-using-SMOKE-Artist-directs-carbon-atoms-canvas-create-amazingly-realistic-portraits.html

The investigations that each of us do when making artwork. This is a way we see into that unknown world that might suggest a different outcome than the one we first thought. This is what play is all about, workshoping through ideas and collaborating with yourself to find new artwork. This is needed for our students to see within the classroom and within ourselves in that classroom. This would help them understand that investigation is a fun way to see something new. Rogers’s talk about the openness of expression in what we create and that it is deeply rooted in finding solutions within the work. They can be stimulating and surprising to each of us. If we work through each new process and surrender to the creative activities, we will have the freedom to grow.

Post Modern Principles:

At first, I had a really hard time understanding where Dow was going with the 7 + 7 principles.  Olivia Gude starts talking about her list of contemporary art education curricula using more than 18 principles. I started to understand this article. Where she talks about the crisscross and overlapping the principles that actual art in the contemporary world came from. Page 12 “Art examples and projects in school art curricula should not be reductive representations of theoretical principles, but should reflect the complexity of actual art.” This is where the play comes in.  If we stay with the 7 + 7 principles, we are not letting our students or ourselves have a way to investigate different ways to do artwork.  Without that we do not have any self-expression to create. Page 12 “ Hot modernism, characterized by artists such as Duchamp and the Dadaists, has not been adequately in K-12 art discourses despite the face that such artist are far more likely to be cited as influential to today’s art world”. I feel that they helped pave the way for contemporary artists having a bigger voice with what art or the art story has to tell.  We always have to remember where art started and understand the path it has taken.  So, that our art can stand and find its place among them.