Teaching art in the age of online learning

My previous reflection had been musing on the possibility of working from home should the covid-19 situation escalate.

This is now a reality.

While I am still committed to developing reflective capabilities in my WHS students,

I have been thinking a lot about how to keep everything manageable.

For my juniors

I think it will be important to keep the teaching and learning simple, as not to overwhelm them.

There is a lot that is changing for students right now, adapting to it all takes up energy and cognitive space.

Now is not the time to be throwing lots of new technology and tools at them.

I have also been thinking about how I can teach art to students who have very limited resources available at home.

I think this will be the time to leverage on what they do have.

We are lucky enough that our students have chromebook and a webcam.

My plan is to use this technology that the students (mostly) have at their fingertips for their learning.

This can be quick and relatively low-tech. e.g.

• Make a colour wheel with things you have around the house and garden and photograph it,
• An alphabet challenge find shapes that look like letters and see how far you can get through the alphabet - photograph these and post them to our class padlet.
• Make a flipbook on a google slide.
• Set up a scene for a photo that creates forced perspective and see who can create the wackiest scene.

For middle school

I have been thinking about how to balance the limited art resources that they may or may not have at home with them,

with the wet and dry media skills I am trying to develop in them to prepare them for level 6 of the visual art curriculum.

This has involved really going back to basics and thinking what can be done with pencil, pen and paper, and possibly what might be lying around in the pantry.

I am really, really grateful that I had the foresight to purchase some art making kits from Joe at HomePrint in Fielding.

This was initially for me to get through some stressful times, but has turned out to be quite fruitful for coming up with ideas for middle school art (and possibly even year 11, if the student hadn't retrieved their art kit from school in the days leading up to the lockdown).

A really simple, yet effective idea is cutting a paper stencil, taping this to another sheet of paper and drawing into the negative space.

Students could use this technique to zen doodle and de-stress or share with the class what is happening in their bubble.

Another neat idea I pinched from a colleague of mine was a food colouring and drawing exercise. All students will need is paper, something to wet the page with, a few drops of food colouring, and something to draw into it with once the food colouring has dried.

The first step would be to wet their page. If they have a brush, this is great, otherwise they need to find some other way of wetting their page so that they have a regular shape on it (perhaps over a sink, hold a piece of paper firmly over a mug of water. Quickly flip it over so that the paper is wet in a circle shape and then back up the right way). Then while the page is still wet, drop a few droplets of food colouring onto the damp paper. The food colouring will mostly just stick to the wet page.

Then leave the page to dry (with something heavy at either end of the page to stop it from curling up).

When the page is dry, doodle into the spaces where there is less colouring. This could be a zen-tangle and quite abstract, or it could be a more organised doodle landscape. For an extra challenge try drawing something you can see in your bubble into the artwork.

(acknowledgement given to M Timutimu, who made these artworks)

For my senior students, it has been a good opportunity to put together some art history tasks that relate to their portfolio work, as many have their art kits but are needing to ration what they do have.

Students get extra literacy credits in a time where their teachers might be pushed to get them through their useful programme of learning and I have come to realise how practical and useful the art history standards can be for visual art students. Win, win.

I'm not going to lie. It has been a lot of work to tailor the art history standards to all the different levels and fields that I teach and their interests.

This was my life last week. I feel like it will be really beneficial in the long run though.

I've also had to rethink my tried and tested painting & printmaking programme for level one students. It's a bit hard to make this happen when there is no printmaking press! Fortunately at level one, students can do printmaking, painting, sculpture, photography or design - they are assessed against general visual art making principles. It really has been a case of trying to put myself in my students' shoes and thinking, what can I do given the resources that I have at hand.

Time will tell, the impact that this has on students' learning.

Computational thinking

I had a conversation with a colleague last week that made the penny drop, in regards to computational thinking.
We were chatting after homework club, and I mentioned that I just couldn't figure out how to fit computational thinking into my subject area. She looked around the room and said "you're already doing it", and then explained that it was just a decision making pathway of how do I get from here to there, and what are the decisions I need to make to get there. I model this for my students all the time, on the walls, on the class site, in conversations.

 

After a bit more of a chat, I realised that we are also practising the next step on from computational thinking, 'iterative thinking' through the visual art creative cycle of 'generate', 'analyse', 'clarify', and 'regenerate'.

I just wish the PD contract that the school has signed up for, would help staff unpack what this might look like in their own subject area. I have gone from feeling like a dunce that just doesn't get it, to feeling inspired. I really feel like collegial conversations are the best PD sometimes.


 'Everything you were looking for was right there with you all along.' - The Wizard of Oz 

'A tribe learning to survive'

"Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression" (Wenger-Trayner 2015) This really resonated with me as I was processing what defined a community of practice. Who is my tribe and what is the 'problem' we are solving in our world?

As teachers, we have many communities of practice. I know that my communities of practice are a broad network. 

(CC https://c1.staticflickr.com/6/5117/7001475448_69bbdb8503_b.jpg)

Wenger (2000) defines the three modes of belonging in a community of practice as engagement, imagination and belonging. That is, what we do together, how we orientate ourselves toward an identity, and how we mutually align ourselves together to work towards a common goal.

The visual art teaching community exemplifies this beautifully for me. From my first moments as a beginning teacher the art teaching community has been a generous broad and accepting 'church', united in achieving the best outcomes for learners. I really value the flexible and organic nature of the Visual Arts community. As a sole charge art teacher, I actively engage with the community as much as possible. The VisArtsNet email forum has enabled me to be a learner and an expert. It challenges me to look at best practice and reflect on my practice.

Reflecting on a very recent week of PD with a community of art teachers, this is just as true today. The whole community's expertise was valued and as a community of educators, we were stronger for it. Though we were a diverse bunch who came from far and wide, we were united in working together to support the best outcomes for students.

I saw many parallels with the principles of Knowledge Building Communities (democratising of knowledge, idea diversity, collective responsibility). 

https://vimeo.com/16930878

There was a  culture of 'progressive problem solving' (Lai, n.d.). Conversation in our breakroom at the PD centred around sharing innovative practice and solving authentic problems that the group really cared about. (Lai, 2014)

It was invaluable to have the time and space to have such focused conversations and to be able to connect 'kanohi ki te kanohi'. This leaves me thinking how can we connect more as a community. Yes, VisArtsNet is a valuable tool, but the email format often facilitates one-way traffic and it is far too easy to simply lurk as a bystander. As a teacher working in my silo of a department in my silo of a school, I wonder how we can facilitate more connection, shared practice and collaboration? What say you, teachers? Are there any creative solutions out there?

Reference list:

Lai,K.(n.d.).Building.knowledge..Retrieved.from http://www.otago.ac.nz/sciences/study/postgraduate/profiles/otago065938.html

Otago UniversityLai, Kwok-Wing, & Pullar, Ken. (2014). Designing knowledge building communities in secondary schools.

Knowledge Building Gallery. (n.d.). Introduction. Retrieved from http://thelearningexchange.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/KB-Gallery-0-Introduction-Accessible.pdf

Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.

Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice | Wenger-Trayner. Retrieved from http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/