Our first assignment was to design our artist's journal using spray paint and a stencil. I created a stencil of a film photo I took of a parrot flying overhead in Costa Rica. It was turned into a vector by Adobe's online tool, then refined with Inkscape. There were a couple different drafts with different colors, distance, intensity, spacing between the sprays and stencils, etc. This process proved to be vital to our final Living Geographies panel, as we used a lot of spray painting there as well. The journal overall was useful to keep track of the readings and how they related to our classwork. We were able to use them for thoughts and notes on our class discussions, making them a great record of how we connected on the ideas. I also used the journal to sketch and plan our projects, including the living geographies collage and panel as well as the art visits (museums and public art). 

Using the journal's reading responses was particularly valuable in understanding how they relate to our actual classroom experience. We have discussed at least a couple of these readings again during our skill-building sessions, and we were able to analyze them more practically and in depth. Our class discussions were a lot more abstract, but illuminated how these more ephemeral ideas could be seen in the classroom. The journal was also useful to flip back to while considering the pedagogy of museums and other artistic spaces - the more academic ideas can be seen being realized in their organization and layout.

I'm glad to have had a place to organize thoughts, the graph paper 

Reading Reflection, Noddings:

Quotes:

"Choice should provide an increased sense of responsibility" - Pg 91

Howe - standards should be "as vague as possible" - Pg 92

"He's not saying drop all standards, but that standards need to be useful. There needs to be an obvious "Why" when learning math, for practicality's sake and to prepare students for actual work."

However, I question "if standards are dropped, though, will they be replaced with better ones or just total failure in education?" This has more to do with governance and politics than pedagogy or philosophy, but I do think that the current standards are subject to those pressures and can't be ignored.