Win, Win and Draw!!!

The priciples used with Buddy in the first semester.

Second semester Kat came in and added movement/world development to the drawing goals. The kids chose "Games" as a theme.

1. How did your team conceive your project? In the beginning when Buddy and I (Jacob) wanted to explore a comic style format of telling stories guided through our own experiences. Teaching the kids different ways of portraying each other and themselves in their self portraits as well as other work. I (Kat) started half way through the year. When Kat arrived the students had been working on drawing as their primary form of art. Since Kat's primary area of expertise is puppetry she researched where drawing and puppetry could intersect. The discovery was pop-up art and after presenting this to the kids we decided to go ahead learning techniques and see where it lead us.

2. How was inquiry introduced to students and how did you integrate the inquiry process into your project? In the first semester inquiry was given to students in their warm ups such as the “exquisite corpse” exercise revealing the different approaches. We had even used this exercise in our second semester with Kat to come up with ideas for characters. Throughout the class we had always had a prompt to give the students and then would see the different approaches to making a scene, world, or character. Mostly though prompts. We would start many days with open ended questions and concepts and then allowed the students to fill in their own content. One day we did a bubble chart and created all the elements of a fantasy world. We had brainstormed well over 100 words on the chart and then we asked the kids to create a fantasy town in the world using 3 words from the chart. Another day we made character sheets and used dice to assign the traits. Some were made on our own and others as a group. We also had side projects we did interspersed along the way. We asked the kids at the beginning what they wanted to be an overarching theme and they chose "Games" as their topic. So along the way we learned a really fun game called "Dice game" and as the semester progressed bring in other board games to play. Playing games was a fun release and gave us a chance to socially connect.

3. How did your team’s project change? In the first semester Buddy and I shifted our focus from drawing and writing comics to creating our own world through a custom risk map where students had more freedom to decide how they wanted their own world to look. For example a student had divided up his land masses based on the dog breeds that lived there or another students’ who had named all of their territories after a fruit, vegetable, or plant. We continued the theme of board games and world creation in the second semester but in different ways since Kat had a different art medium we approached the board games with dice games and world creations with scene building through pop ups. Through the course of the class we developed ideas of our world and characters we deicide to take our pop-ups in a theatrical direction. We decided each student would make a back drop and use it as the scenery for a mini paper puppet show. This idea evolved as we explored different things to draw over the whole semester. We had a paper puppet project where we learned how to take art and break it up into moving pieces. We also had a day where we talked about story creation and how to develop a plot. A lot of work like this was done one on one. Since we had a small class we could do a lot of one on one time and let each student focus on and develop ideas in their own way.

4. What did you learn about your students and how they learn? That they are tired a lot and want their own space. The stress of school and the past two years of pandemic have really been hard and this class wants their own time. We worked out a system where they work on their project for the first part of class and then can have free time for themselves. Sometimes they would keep working, sometimes they would play with their technology. I also learned a lot about their home lives. One student lives with her aunt and cousin and the fullness of their house can be challenging. Another student was struggling with being bullied so we used a bubble chart to find new ways to deal with the issue. Another one of our students' is adopted and has 13 siblings. They don't all live together. Then another student is really struggling to sleep at night (something a number of students have actually brought up) and is frustrated because sometimes it gets him in trouble with his parents at school. I was glad at how much our time drawing allowed us to talk and learn about each other. Often we would all talk and just tell each other stories.

5. What did you learn about the way you teach? That flexibility and diversification is necessary to make meaningful connections with our students. Each of them has their own needs and styles of learning. being able to adjust the way we communicate with each of them to try to meet each student in the middle really helps in fostering progress.

6. How did the pandemic affect your class? I know it had a huge impacts but we did not really feel it in a directly pandemic way each day. By now the kids are comfortable with masks and really good about wearing hem and being safe. the psychological effect are enormous and impossible to see all at once. As long as we see, acknowledge, and address these issues when they arise we are helping. It does not matter if they are form the pandemic, regular stress, or simply puberty. As long as we see and support we are growing as a class and community.