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Post date: Dec 6, 2014 9:28:32 PM
These two projects are new, so my students were kind of working out a lot of kinks in the process of making their work. I will admit that I'm not the best at designing projects that bring out the best in my students. I'm kind of always perpetually caught between providing supports and releasing those supports in the hopes that something good will happen either way. Case in point, the Andy Warhol color study is pretty structured, there's a process and a very tight result, not a whole lot of new ground is covered. If I had a bigger budget that'd be a printmaking assignment, or it would just generally result in a better process. The other choice was way more open, create a triptych based on nature, make it abstract. I'm not great at open assignments, or perhaps I just didn't provide enough process or explanation, on how to take a source and make it abstract. Not that every artwork needs to be abstract but, it helps push them creatively in my opinion. And there was basically no set process for how to create the content, the requirement was that they use a very specific set of color schemes. I think I'm going to have to add more process to that particular assignment if I want to see better results.
The open assignments are hard, I'm still at odds with students who like more freedom. I want to foster that creativity without the lack of pressure to innovate a particular problem at hand. And maybe that's the problem, the prompt. Even though this assignment had freedom, the few bits of structure just seemed to choke out any interest. It makes me wonder what complete freedom does to the students who don't like the structure. And to an extent I have seen those students rudderless products. They are what they are. I think I have no way of knowing what the more TAB structured classroom would look like with me at the helm without first getting a grasp at what I want out of that environment. I think I need to see more promising results out of that environment, I think I am getting that more in my upper division courses. The freedoms I grant my upper division students get much better results. For some reason I'm okay with their level of maturity making decisions that result in skill and age appropriate work than I am with unskilled or naive attempts at art making. I rather like a build them up and let them loose approach. I still think though, that my teaching remains to be proven, the results I've managed are by no means satisfying in the overall sense. Part of that's my fault for teaching a certain way and not creating more dynamic curriculum and another part of that is my laziness in getting my students work out there (this website aside).
Anyhew, good examples below.
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