- Art education is moving into the 21st century, in my opinion, behind the times. I really enjoyed the articles because it shows the initiative of art teachers now trying to bring their students up to date. I especially liked reading Principles of Possibility by Olivia Gude because she had a clear path that she wanted art education to eventually move to. She starts out by saying that the 7 principles of art and design that we all had to learn and are still learning today in our art classes are, while important, slightly outdated and should be replaced. She explained that students need to be kept up on the world around them to be able to produce art meaningful to themselves. I think that the “Attentive Living” section of the article is very insightful. Students need to experience everyday life to be able to make meaningful art and also apply it to everyday things. In my teaching I hope to instill in my students that art is FUN. Of course, like in my high school art classrooms, art is a “free period”, and getting students around that thought will be challenging, but showing the students new techniques of modern artists will hopefully hold their interest. No matter what a students number one interest is, there is artwork out there that connects. Which brings me to my other thought, showing the students that artwork should be connected to them more than what they think I want the art to be in more important. The textbook goes into making works personal, and I think that is what art needs to be to be meaningful to anyone, even the viewers.
- The Art 21 that I watched was about Cai Guo-Qiang. He uses gun powder to produce his works. In my art lesson, power (or loss of power) would the theme of the lesson. I think that I would talk to me students about experimenting with different materials, and making mistakes. The artist himself said that he wants to work with a material, he wants to have it give him problems and have to work through those problems. This is very helpful for students. The students will either have success or failure, but it’s not about the success/failure, its about the road taken to get their and the processes gone through to get to that final project. This artist shows power through the explosions of the gun powder. More of the work is in the performance of the explosion than the actual outcome. I would have my students pick a material that traditionally wouldn’t be considered an art material and have them experiment and have them show the successes and failures. Working with a new material can show the students that a loss of power can make beautiful artworks, like in the video.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Discussion 1 Art in the 21st Century
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The way we teach art has to change with the times and I am happy to see that you agree: "students need to be kept up on the world around them to be able to produce art meaningful to themselves. " This means that art teachers need to have a deep knowledge base of media and artists so that they can communicate about the big ideas in art across time and cultures. Helping students understand the choice of medium influences the expresssion as with Cai Guo-Qiang you said" More of the work is in the performance of the explosion than the actual outcome. I would have my students pick a material that traditionally wouldn’t be considered an art material and have them experiment and have them show the successes and failures." Nice work!
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your comment about how we’re behind the times in terms of what we teach to our students. I liked the part where Gude (at least I think it was in her article) mentions that it’s more like we’re being taught design rather than art as a whole. Today, experimentation seems much more accepted and encouraged than it was a hundred years ago, which means the definition of art is becoming much broader. Ironically, we aren’t taught about contemporary art very much during our K-12 years, so people are much quicker to dismiss it as a whole. If our schools don’t care about where art is today, we can’t really expect the general public to care either.
ReplyDelete"No matter what a students number one interest is, there is artwork out there that connects... showing the students that artwork should be connected to them more than what they THINK I want the art to be in more important." [emphasis added] This is truly the struggle of teaching any class - getting the students to realise that they are learning and creating for themselves and not for their teachers. All too often do students worry about their grades more than their actual performance. Though I may have been considered a bit stubborn throughout my schooling for creating on my own terms in both English and Art classes, through my creativity, and not conformity, I managed to achieve outstanding success in those fields.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that it was interesting to me to read Gude's idea of attentive living. As future art teachers, we know that using what we see and experience around us is an important part of art making, but it will be challenging to explain to our students the importance of these observations. I also agree with you when you say that a lot of students see art as a 'free period'. I have to admit that when I was in middle and high school, I viewed classes like art and family consumer science and industrial technology as 'free periods' also, but now that I am going into the field I am motivated to make my students think differently. It is up to us to change our students' minds about art and to help them realize it as a true outlet for their ideas and emotions. I agree that this will be one of the most difficult parts of teaching art.
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