Choice Units in Drawing & Illustration

Post date: Apr 23, 2015 12:40:14 PM

For the late half of this semester students in my Drawing and Illustration classes are getting a choice between five units. Each unit has my typical PowerPoint for each assignment set, and each one has a video lecture. They are encouraged to look at the assignments for themselves and/or watch the lecture videos, or if they're lazy I can do a quick mini lecture at my desk. They're doing quite well with it, I'm excited to see them continue to pursue their interests. I'd love to get into this faster and maybe compress my first semester curriculum into choice units. It's great to see them pursue what they want. And granted, I'm making the main choices, like what subject matter, or what kind of techniques they should try. I still feel like I posses knowledge of what they should learn and pursue to expand their horizons. It'd be great if I could trust them to arrive at their own choices naturally, I just don't have a structure for building that up. They make the same choices regardless of what kind of structure I put up around them. And I also feel that if I forced more creative decisions there'd be reticence and or hesitance on their part to truly embrace those more creative decisions. Oh well, stuff to try next time.