LTC 8730 Topic Presentation

Topic Presentation on Prezi

Winds of Change: Pursuing Rigor, Relevance, & Relationships in the Art Room 06/19/2014 0 Comments

LTC 8730 "This I Believe" statement

"This I Believe..."

Blog Written reflection (*or image): “This I believe about art education…” statement in 250 words. New synthesized learning from the topics in this class should be evident in this new personal teaching philosophy statement. *(May be presented as a visual metaphor as an alternative to a written manifesto.)

I believe... 07/13/2014 0 Comments   Taking inspiration from an incredible artist that straddled the line of talented and thought-provoking, I have decided to model my teaching philosophy on Salvador Dali's "My Struggle," a personal credo for his life and creative vision. In his manifesto he outlined 25 things/ideas he was "against" and 25 things/ideas he was "for." In typical Dali & Surrealist style, some were completely absurd, and some match perfectly with his persona. You can see an awesome illustrated version created by Molly Crabapple for BrainPickings here. AGAINST: Art as Elitism. Power trips & Egos. Follow-the-leader art projects. "Art" devoid of meaning or purpose. Careers designed / chosen just to make money. Art for a few. Do as I say, not as I do. Laziness. Creativity can only be found in a few. Not everyone can draw. Standardized tests in art. Solitary confinement. Skills without context. Embarrassment and Belittlement. Leading a horse to water. Traditional lecture notes. Bullies and Meanies. Those unwilling to challenge themselves. Boredom. Washing my hands. Art just to shock. Painting & Sculpture as the only kinds of art. Critics. Schools without art. Doing Everything the Same.    FOR: Art as Democracy. Art as investigation. Art as expression. Art for Everyone. Art that uplifts. Personal fulfillment. Meaning Making. Social Justice. Art History. Jumpstarting Creative Blocks. Nurturing Creativity. Initiative. Correcting mistakes. Building Relationships. Finding Rigor. Making it Relevant. Sketchbooks & Journals to document a process and keep track of thoughts, not as a homework assign Technology integration. Meeting students where they are. High Expectations with a helping hand to get there. Culture through Art. Community and Collaboration. Criticism. Art Everywhere. Art Families.

LTC 8730 Five Minds Paper

Building a Capacity for the 5 Minds for the Future in Art Education 06/17/2014 0 Comments   Michelle Ridlen Survey of Art Education 8730 June 2014   Building a Capacity for the 5 Minds for the Future in Art Education             In Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner describes 5 “minds” that we should master in order to survive a faster-paced future in the 21st century. Gardner posits that much of education is designed around a vision of school for preparedness for the 19th or 20th century. He states we would be better off if we cultivated these five ways of acting and thinking that are critical for success in our rapidly changing global society. These include the disciplined, synthesizing, and creating minds that are more related to intellect as well as the respectful and ethical minds that emphasize our character.  The five minds are the main characteristics we will need to develop in our students if we are to have leaders, workers, and citizens in a productive and worthwhile society. Gardner states: ·      Individuals without one or more disciplines will not be able to succeed at any demanding workplace and will be restricted to menial tasks. ·      Individuals without synthesizing capabilities will be overwhelmed by information and unable to make judicious decisions about personal or professional matters. ·      Individuals without creating capacities will be replaced by computers and will drive away those who do have the creative spark. ·      Individuals without respect will not be worthy of respect by others and will poison the workplace and the commons. ·      Individuals without ethics will yield a world devoid of decent workers and responsible citizens: none of us will want to live on that desolate planet. The Disciplined Mind             The disciplined mind refers to “employing the ways of thinking associated with major scholarly disciplines” and being “capable of applying oneself diligently” while “improving steadily, and continuing beyond formal education.” As teachers I think this practice is especially important to strive for. As a teacher we each should continue to seek new ideas and things to learn. Massimo Vignelli, the famed designer said, “Discipline is the attitude that helps us discern right from wrong … Discipline is what makes us responsible towards ourselves [and] toward the society in which we live.”  As role models, one of our first responsibilities should be to go after life long learning, to develop our disciplined mind. We should teach our students to pursue what interests them, to engage in acts of curiosity and nurture asking questions that we then desire to answer. By engaging in developing a disciplined mind, we should embrace the difference between subject matter and discipline. Instead of trying to commit to memory a large number of facts and then being tested on those facts, we should structure our teaching and learning experiences to help students acquire specific habits of mind and ways of thinking. The information should be understood in a way that is not an end in itself or a ways to an end, but rather as a means to a better-informed practice within the discipline. By being better-informed practitioners, and by being more engaged in the wonders and curiosities of the world around us, we are better global citizens. In my classroom studio, specifically I would want my students to engage in the pursuit of artistic habits. Developing their studio habits of mind, ways to generate ideas and create, and their personal creative process.             The Synthesizing Mind             The synthesizing mind is able to select and sort important and relevant information from large amounts of information that is presented. The synthesizing mind can translate that information in a variety of ways to make sense of it to self and explain it to others. I see this mind as being integral to the transference of information so that actual learning can take place. With the wide variety of information sources, and out interconnectedness through technology, it seems that this skill is even more important than in the past.             As part of the studio classroom, students should use their ability to synthesize their knowledge about multiple processes and sources for content in order to create, respond to, and reflect the world around them. Part of an artist’s voice is discovering how they reinterpret, or synthesize their interactions with the world and their community. Students should be experiencing the world, taking it all in, and adding it to their repertoire of experiences. Teachers should expose students to art experiences (studio labs, exercises, thought provoking questions, sketchbook assignments, opportunities for play, etc.) and have students reflect on them, asking them to take time to recognize what is important to them and incorporating them into their existing knowledge base. The Creating Mind             The creating mind aims to pose new questions, offer new solutions, innovate, and build on what came before. The creating mind requires a knowledge of what came before, making judgments of quality and acceptability and going beyond the existing knowledge base.  A creating mind will seek to think “outside the box” and to come up with unexpected results.             As artists, we should practice this habit so that we aren’t just regurgitating the same thoughts, but adding new perspectives and voices. We should push ourselves as teachers to develop creative art adventures, offering fresh perspectives and new ways for students to tap into their insights. We should expect students to develop this habit for themselves and seek to develop an ever-broadening reference to pull from. We should avoid having students copy other works they see unless they are being used to explore appropriation or parody – addressing ideas, context and content. Students should address multiple representations and multiple approaches to subjects. Teachers should encourage students to illuminate their thinking and approach exploration unabashedly. The Respectful Mind             As teachers, we are not just keepers of knowledge found in books, but we are also guides and mentors for more abstract concepts found in an individual’s and society’s character. The respectful mind is about responding to others with sympathy and respect, acting constructively when confronted with differences between not only individuals but also when among groups. Developing the respectful mind, we should seek to understand and work with others who are different and extend beyond mere tolerance.              Within the realm of art we should encourage students to encounter works that they may not seek themselves and offer chances for contemplation. We should offer these encounters not in isolation, but with peers and give them the chance to explore differences in preference and opinion. We should cultivate a supportive studio environment that encourages students to engage in respectful dialogue about each other’s work. We ourselves should provide models, practicing respectful feedback and nurturing support, seeking to understand a student’s aesthetic or message before condemning or altering it. We should model respectful behavior when interacting with not just our students, but also our peers, colleagues, parents, and supervisors. We should be mindful of our opinions and in passing judgment out loud so that students can observe or over hear. The Ethical Mind             The ethical mind is another more abstract mind that should be cultivated and continuously groomed. Students should be given the opportunity to examine and contemplate their own place in the world as a global citizen and their desire for what makes a more perfect society. Students should also be given the opportunity to place themselves in their current world and school community, encouraged to develop a better version of local community and learning environment. Student’s should reflect on their personal role, and be given a chance to express that in their artwork or contribution to their class, school, or community. Students should explore the core values they hold in their roles as student artist or future professional, and be given the opportunity to exercise their interpretation of those roles. I think it is important to offer students a safe place to tackle their thoughts on tricky issues. To offer a place (their artwork / sketchbook) that will remain private until it is chosen to be shared, so that students can develop and mold their thoughts before subjecting them to judgment. As teachers we are trustees of these core values and we can pass them along to our students. We should act to support students as they discover for themselves the role they are to play within this domain, offering insight and guidance when they stray too far from the path of ethical decisions.  Again, we should model ethical decisions and behavior within the realm of an artist, an art patron, and art viewer as well as within our role as teacher in a school community. We should model proper artizen etiquette.  Teaching our students through these five minds will require a personal reflection and desire to continue to grow ourselves as professionals and citizens of the world. We need to embrace our quickly changing society and reinterpret our place in it. Without the development of the disciplined, synthesizing, creating, respectful, and ethical mind we are doing our students s disservice and depriving them of a richer art experience. By ignoring them we are stripping a layer of promise off what learning in the arts could be.

LTC 8730 Topic Project/Paper

Topic Project: 'ThingLink'ed artwork 07/13/2014 0 Comments   Link Here: http://www.thinglink.com/scene/543446227308511232  Add Comment   Live A Creative Life 07/13/2014 0 Comments   Michelle Ridlen Live a Creative Life Survey of Art Education Culminating Project Summer 2014             This summer’s course, Survey of Art Education, gave me much to think about and ponder over as I finish my degree program. In particular, I kept thinking about where we have come from in our evolution of pedagogy and standards within art education.  With the release of the new national core arts standards, I couldn’t help but also think about where we are headed. We as art educators recognize the importance that the arts play in education. We see the tangible differences it makes in the everyday lives of students; increasing attendance and achievement in the short term and creating connections and building relationships that can change the course of a life in the long term.  The arts build skills that are easily transferable to many facets of learning and in the pursuit of higher standardized test scores, these skills have been inadvertently pushed to the side. As the country, and the world, start to move towards Common Core and a broader focus on 21st century skills, the abilities that the arts promote and propagate are again being embraced. As art educators now is our time to step forward and embrace the great impact that the arts have on learning in a contemplative and meaningful way.  With a determined and deliberate focus, we can secure a position within the foundation of learning for all students.              In an attempt to illustrate what this might look like in conjunction with the new National Core Arts Standards for visual arts, I have chosen to create examples of how the standards may be interpreted for a high school introductory level art course. I have written each as a learning target supported by research into best practices, and the importance of considering rigor, relevance, and relationships.  The artwork that I have embedded the links into is a nod to contemporary artist Trey Speegle.  Speegle uses text juxtaposed with imagery to explore themes of hope, love, longing, and transformation. I have chosen to use a painting created using directions from the PBS Joy of Painting host and icon Bob Ross and layered text using letters that are meant to continue the underlying imagery with a paint-by-number framework. The text reads, “Live a Creative Life” calling on the viewer to contemplate whether practices such as paint-by-number and step-by-step painting techniques really allow us to practice our creative thinking skills. On the other hand, if we were to instead consider what we would lose by not creating at all, waiting for the perfect moment of artistic inspiration to strike, what would our lives be missing? Ross was infamous for repeatedly stating on his show his belief that everyone had inherent artistic talent and could become an accomplished artist given time, practice, and encouragement, and to this end was often fond of saying, "We don't make mistakes; we just have happy accidents." (Bennett, p. 48) Can this type of artistic endeavor be the training wheels that lead to a more creative outlook and perspective? How can we cultivate creativity in its many forms to transform our lives and thinking?             As artist educators, I ask teachers to consider are we keeping our students in this holding pattern instead of challenging them to move beyond the paint-by-numbers, do-as-I-do method of instruction? How can we transform our instruction to encourage growth and self-discovery within our students that demonstrates not just skill in an end product but an advancement in attitudes, behaviors, creative thinking, risk-taking, and problem solving? It is my hope that we will embrace this opportunity to transform art education and rise to the challenge of a more sophisticated call to teaching the arts.   Bibliography Bennett, Kaylen (2005). Rick Benzel, ed. Inspiring Creativity: An Anthology of Powerful Insights And Practical Ideas to Guide You to Successful Creating. Playa del Rey: Creativity Coaching Assoc. Press. p. 48. Buffington, M. (2014). Power Play: Rethinking Roles in the Art Classroom. Art Education, vol. 67, no. 4.  Burton, J. M., & Hafeli, M. C. (2012). Conversations in art: The dialectics of teaching and learning. National Art Education Association. Carroll, K. (2007). Better Practice in Visual Arts Education: Building Effective Teaching Through Educational. Reston, VA. Natl Art Education Assn; 4th edition. Franco, M. & Unrath, K. (2014). Carpe Diem: Seizing the Common Core with Visual Thinking Strategies in the Classroom. Art Education, vol. 67, no. 1. Gude, O. (2013). New school art styles: The project of art education. Art Education, vol. 66, no.1. Jensen, E. (2013). Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind. Alexandria, VA. ASCD. National Coalition for Core Arts Standards. (2009). National Core Arts Standards: A Conceptual Framework for Arts Learning. http://www.nationalartsstandards.org/sites/default/files/NCCAS%20%20Conceptual%20Framework_0.pdf National Coalition for Core Arts Standards. (2014). National Core Arts Standards. http://www.nationalartsstandards.org