Art for the Animals a Starry Night Celebration 2018

Friends, Ima be honest with you. I've been in a funk. It started with a sinus-y head cold that morphed into no-energy-itis which developed into a bad example of nobody-likes-me, everybody-hates-me, I'm-simply-gonna-sit down-over-here-and-pout. I have blamed my cold and lack of energy for my bad mental attitude only, if I'm beingness truly honest, there have actually been a couple things eating away at my thoughts. And 1 of them has been teaching art.

So here'due south the bargain: I recently joined a group on Facebook called "Fine art Teachers". And information technology'southward pretty rad, interacting with art educators, seeing the work of their students, hearing their struggles and successes. Merely there have also been some, um, debates. Information technology seems that there are two camps of art teachers out in that location: those that teach choice-based art and, well, those that don't.

Now earlier I go tip-toeing into a land mine (because those same debates have gotten very feisty), lemme first say that I am not a option-based art teacher. Nor do I know very much near the concept although I am intrigued. From my agreement, in a choice-based fine art room, children are allowed to work with their chosen art media to express their ideas. In a nutshell.

Hither'due south what I love near the idea: children creating art based on their own individual interests and inspirations. In a choice-based art room, the kids are routinely introduced to new media and allowed to explore their ideas with that new cloth. Or they tin use whatever other supplies that take been introduced throughout the twelvemonth. Information technology sounds so happy and harmonious and free. In my imagination, information technology looks like a college fine art studio filled with little people sculpting, painting and weaving their niggling hearts out.

Only here'southward the thing that bothers me: a music teacher wouldn't simply evidence a kid a room total of musical instruments, teach them a couple of the basics and tell them to and so make music. Not without kickoff education them all that there is to know about playing, writing and composing a piece, not to mention introducing them to both classical and contemporary composers. Considering without those fundamentals, I imagine children would but bang on the instruments, grow bored and lose involvement. Is it possible the same might happen in an art room? I don't know.

I've heard the argument that if you, as an art instructor, know what the end product of a lesson is going to look like, then the work of art is your own and not your students. This really actually made me question how I teach. Am I doing a disservice to my students? Am I robbing them of their creativity and exploration? Is this Starry Dark/collage/painting/weaving project recently created past 1st course actually harming the creative exploration of my students?

Again, I don't know.

What I do know is that, like a classroom teacher giving a exam to check for hitting benchmarks and agreement, I can encounter that my students learned the following (side notation: each "Solar day" is a 30 minute art class. Yes, 30-super-brusk/very-precious minutes):

Day #1: How to mix a shade of blue with blackness and blueish. How to employ a variety of brush strokes and lines to show movement in their sky like our inspirational artist, Vincent van Gogh. How to pigment the secondary color green and create a texture onto that newspaper.

Day #2: How to create a mural collage past tearing the green paper and creating a foreground, middle footing and back ground. How to create a newspaper loom for weaving.

Day #iii: How to weave. How to use collage to create a business firm past cutting out geometric shapes from recycled pieces of newspaper.

Twenty-four hours #4: How to add together a star to my piece (see this postal service on how we marbled these stars) and have information technology tell a story in your work of fine art. Is information technology a shooting star? A falling star? An explosion of color? What can you lot remember of?

Mean solar day #5: How to add that house to the landscape and add other elements of their choosing to that landscape. How to brainstorm ideas for their piece of work of art (what tin get in the background? a dog house? a neighborhood? copse?).

(Houses most half finished...withal working out ideas for the background and the shooting star.)

Knowing that they take learned all of this, is this lesson a bad one? I like to recall not. My students surpassed my notion of what their completed piece would look like by adding animals, trees, dog houses, houses in the altitude, moons, curtains in the window, you proper noun information technology.

But I did have a notion what their finished piece of work of art would look similar.

Which again, brings me dorsum to where I started. Sigh.

Look, I've been pedagogy art for a very long time (this is my 16th year, time seriously does fly!) and I'm not fifty-fifty going to pretend I've got the answers or fifty-fifty a flipping clue. And I call back those folks that do think they have all the answers are just fools. Or peradventure cowards that are too afraid to question what they've ever washed. I mean, shouldn't we always exist looking to do what is all-time for our students?

And so, I inquire you, honestly, what are your thoughts?

And, if I've offended anyone, selection-based or not, that was not my intention. Thanks, ya'll.

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Source: https://cassiestephens.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-artroom.html

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