STRAGEGIES FOR MAKING & TEACHING ART

LESSON PLAN

STRATEGIES FOR MAKING AND TEACHING ART-  ED 5306, Weeks 1, 2, & 3

Call & Response

Essential Question: How does art practice serve as a source of inspiration for meaningful teaching and learning in visual art? 

Elegant Problem: Using your preferred art-making materials, create a response to a partner's personal work in YOUR OWN personal visual language in order to reflect upon both your partner’s artistic practice as well as your own underlying intention and embodied responses as a maker.

Learning Outcomes: 

I can collaborate to construct a sense of classroom community.

I can introduce myself to the community. 

I can identify strategic thinking in my everyday life, artistic practice and teaching practice. 

I can identify patterns, themes and authentic characteristics in my artmaking practice.

Rationale: Learners are entering into a second semester of completely virtual learning after experiencing the shared (though differently experienced) trauma of the closing/modified operation of schools in spring of 2020. Under typical conditions, learners at this stage in the MAT program do not yet perceive themselves as part of a cohesive cohort with shared values, goals, and experiences. Learners are currently in their junior year at MICA, or are in their first year of graduate school in the MICA MAT program, and undergraduate learners are dispersed amongst different BFA departments that they may identify with more strongly than with the MAT program. Many learners are just beginning to discern, distill, and make definitive statements about their independent artmaking practices. Many feel tensions between their personal approach to artmaking and the influences of their professors and peers. Still others do not experience a sense of belonging in their BFA department, and/or feel lost in finding their artistic voice. 

The early engagements in this fully virtual course (this one most of all) were designed to introduce participants to one another, establish rapport and mutual respect, and to provide opportunities for critical examination of one’s own rationale for artmaking, personal practices/rituals, conceptual underpinnings, and tendencies. 

The main outcome of this course entails locating a Big Idea and the impetus for a unit of study within one’s own artistic practice. After this engagement, learners will be presenting themselves as artists to the class community in a more formal way, and participants will be critically examining one another’s artist presentations for Big Ideas and conceptual underpinnings. 

Learning Tasks: 

Week 1 

• Preparatory homework: Locate/document a recent artwork that you have made and that you feel proud of. This should be a work that represents your personal artistic voice/authentic artist self. Please upload the documentation to the linked Padlet.

Week 2 

•  In-class reflective grounding activity: For 15 minutes, journal about your personal art history answering as many of these questions as you feel compelled to answer: Answer any of these questions (adapted from Tharp, 2003), in any order:

• What is the first creative act you remember engaging in?

• What did play look like for you as a child? Is it anything like your art practice now?

• Which artists do you admire most? Why are they your role models?

• What do you and your art role models have in common?

• Do you collect anything?

• Where does your inspiration tend to come from?

• What action verbs would you use to describe your art practice while you're working?

• When you work, do you enjoy the process or the result more?

• What is your ideal creative activity?

• At any points in your history, do you notice a braiding together of your art DNA and your teaching DNA? Where do they overlap? Please mark that point.

• In-class close-looking activity- “The Call” You have been paired with a partner. Locate the work of your partner. Your partner's work is a call - in their own visual language. Take some time right now to look closely at the work. Describe its physical properties/appearance as though you were talking on the phone to a friend who cannot see the work. Analyze the choices that the artist made, imagine the process (decision making, artmaking, etc) that went into the creation of the work. Interpret its possible meaning(s).

• Studio homework: “The Response” Now begin to examine your own instinctual responses to what you see in front of you. What is it saying to you? How do you feel called to respond? Take some time to document the feelings, urges, and ideas that your partner’s work awakes within you. Begin sketching initial responses, play/experiment with materials-- whatever artmaking entry point you find. For homework, create a work that is inspired by your partner’s work in some way, but operate as your own authentic artist-self.

Week 3 

• “Thin Slices, Big Ideas” idea generation activity:  Looking at your peers' Call and Response artworks, jot down descriptive words/phrases that come to mind on the attached Jamboard. In doing so, we are knowingly making snap judgments here-- you may not feel that you know enough about your peers’  work yet, but please consider both their Call and their Response artworks as a "thin-slice" of their current practice. Each was made under different circumstances, but what common threads connect them? 

• Check for understanding: How does this relate to our overall objective in this course? Why might we do this before hearing one another's Artistic Practice Presentations next week?

• Show and Tell - art presenting strategy: Share with us something that you are proud of (your Call OR your Response artwork!), something that you learned or found challenging, a question that you have about a peer’s artwork(s), or a shout-out to a peer who created something compelling

• Closing Reflection: Locate yourself on the Jamboard slides from the Thin Slice activity. What words do you see? Do they resonate with you or not? What visual evidence might they be noticing in your Call and your Response pieces that would compel them to respond in the ways that they did? Does your "artistic DNA" shine through in both pieces? In what ways? What Big Idea(s) do YOU think run through your work? 

• Homework: Create your Artistic Practice Presentation (our first major assignment) to introduce your artist self to us more formally next week. Use your written reflections from Week 2, your visual and written documentation from your studio experiences, and any insights gained tonight to inform your statements about your practice. 

Click here to further interact with this lesson plan and our Virtual Classroom:

Strategies Virtual Classroom Home

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3