Mindwork:
· List and categorize trial research questions
o Teaching practices
§ Does frequent group work increase student participation in whole class content dialogue?
§ Does weekly scheduled student-teacher conferences promote deeper investigation into an area of interest?
§ If I address common frustrations of the creative process (“writer’s block,” fear, repetition, etc.) will my students be more likely to overcome those obstacles?
§ Can inspiration boards/webs be a solution to surface-level investigations?
§ Can “inspiration journals” be a solution to surface-level investigations?
§ The organization of a classroom and how that fosters imagination, creativity, and productivity.
o Student learning or outcomes
§ Does assigning a “research reading hour” once a week increase quality of student artistic investigation?
§ The role/result of art education beyond high school.
§ The power of community or group art experiences to influence tolerance and respect among students.
§ The effect of viewing art outside of the classroom (museums, public, etc.) on student depth of interpretation.
§ Extra-curricular art-related activities and depth of learning.
o School policies or politics
§ Does allowing students to listen to their own music privately increase creativity and productivity?
o Curriculum
§ Is a focus on the “self” a reliable method to hook students who are not intrinsically interested in art?
§ How can I approach teaching self-directed artistic research?
§ How can I incorporate the discussion of visual culture into an elementary classroom?
Mindwork (2):
· Who am I in relation to this idea? How does my position affect my approach?
o As an art student at one point and an art teacher now, I feel that I have a deep understanding of how broad and deep artistic research regarding the development of a project can influence how successful and thoughtful that project will be. I feel that especially at the middle and high school levels of artmaking, some fashion of deep, guided artistic research into an area of interest can benefit not only that student’s art abilities, but his or her self-development as a person, as well.
· What ethical issues might I raise?
o Perhaps certain students’ access to research materials outside of class. Also, some students will most definitely encounter sensitive topics/ideas as they look into certain artists.
· Who will be best served by this study?
o I hope the students will be best served, but art teachers will hopefully have a better understanding as to how to guide and inspire deeper artistic investigations.
· Who might be affected or hurt, and how?
o I could possibly see a conflict between students and their parents if a student were to become interested in an artist that works around ideas such as sexuality, death, drugs, or other sensitive topics.
· What are my hidden biases and assumptions?
o I guess I assume that every student has an area of intense interest. I hope, anyway, that I could help him or her find one.
· Should I face these difficulties directly? How could I avert them?
o This would depend on the grade level. For middle school students, it would probably benefit me to give students a list of artists/articles/books, etc. to choose from categorized by topics of interest. That way, I could control the material that they are accessing. However, when it comes to high school students, I think it would be ok to just tackle problems when they arose.
· Topic rewrite…
o Exploring the value of teacher-guided artistic research to increase the depth and breadth of meaning put into student artwork.
§ Inspiration boards/webs, teacher-student dialogue journals, image collections, research assignments, reading and writing time
Mindwork (3):
· Possibly unclear terms
o Artistic research
o Teacher-guided
· Insider and Outsider understandings
o An “insider” would probably understand that artistic research includes a variety of materials: images, literature, music, text, as well as research into artists and cultures. An “outsider” would probably just imaging writing a research paper about a particular topic. An “insider” would understand the idea of teacher-guided as a teacher facilitating a student’s exploration of an idea by asking questions, keeping on task, and bringing up materials to explore. An “outsider” might imagine worksheets or assignments that point the student in a particular direction without an open choice.
· Underlying theories
o Open-ended, active, student-centered learning and investigation; interests drive learning; students need choices to grow in learning
· Ethical issues involved in question
o Only the possibility of a student tackling sensitive issues, and how to approach that student if need be
· What’s missing? What am I assuming?
o Perhaps I am over assuming that all middle/high school students are able to work with open-ended problems. Perhaps I need to consider that some students will work better if I assign them the material to research, or if I direct them to the place they need to be.
· Subquestions?
o How do inspiration boards/webs help brainstorming?
o Do all students work well with this process?
o How can I help guide and facilitate artistic research?
o How can technology be utilized to guide artistic research?
o Will students benefit from keeping a journal? Will I have the time to actually read their journal?
o How can student-teacher conferences be organized to be the most effective?
o Does bringing a reading/research “hour” into the class schedule benefit artistic research? How can I prove if it does?
o How can reflective writing play a role in student artistic research?
I'm also very interested in your topic of artistic research and artist journals. You ask if it will be beneficial and if you'd even have time to read them. What if didn't necessarily approach the artist journals as an "assignment?" Maybe sometimes you can have prompted journal entries, kind of like daily logs in english class, which you could spend time reading and maybe grading these entries. But hopefully their journal can become just that, a journal. I hope that my students will acquire a want and need to spend time with their journal as a private, personal space to think and create.
ReplyDeleteYour "How can I help guide and facilitate artistic research?" subquestion had a lot of resonance with me. I'm also unsure of how to offer guidance to younger students about how to conduct research into trends in contemporary art, art history, or art technique/methodology. There are materials like Art: 21 that offer a window, but this is an aspect of the artistic process that I feel was entirely neglected in my own early education, so I don't have many models to guide me and I see this as a future difficulty that I'll encounter (even with our extensive Big Idea training!). That said, I feel that the bigger challenge you may encounter in your research is how to determine whether your efforts have significantly effected "depth and breadth of meaning." Ultimately, I feel that the greatest value our teaching has for our students is in the meaning, depth, and happiness they achieve in their own thinking and pursuits as a result of whatever scaffolding we provide them, but those are subjective goals that can only be evaluated by the students and guessed at by the feedback they provide us: difficult things to measure!
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