Mdm Ira Wati Sukaimi taught in the Art Elective Programme and was the Art coordinator at CHIJ Secondary (Toa Payoh). She was also involved in the school’s successful application for Centre of Excellence (COE) in Language and the Arts in 2007. Subsequently, she served as a Senior Teacher (Aesthetics) in Holy Innocents’ High School where she crafted the school’s Aesthetics framework in 2009. Mdm Ira also contributed a reflection essay for Drawing Learners, a monograph published by STAR in 2013 entitled Engaging Students through Elegant Problems. She believes that a good Arts curriculum enables students to create meaningful works imbued with personal vision, self-worth and emotions.

NAEA Delegates 1st Briefing

10 February 2015

3:00pm - 5:30pm

This was the first meeting for all delegates and we finally get to meet our room mates, if we were not already familiar with them yet.

It was a good introductory session where we find out about each other's areas of interests. Some are interested to find out about research findings pertaining to art education while some are interested to find out about new developments in art pedagogical approaches.

We also shared our ideas about Design and it was interesting to note that we each have our own interpretation about its definition. Unanimously however, we believe that aesthetics is essential in the design of functional products and that understanding extended to how lessons are designed in our pedagogical practice.

We scoped our focus of the conference to mainly 3 broad categories;

1) Design in the art curriculum

2) Pedagogical approaches that supports our NT national Art syllabus

3) Museum education approaches

With this scope, we identified relevant conference sessions.

Our next meeting is an LJ to the National Design Centre. Looking forward to a tour of the prototyping labs and understanding the work of the NDC,

LJ to National Design Centre

27 February 2015

3:00pm - 5:30pm

We started the tour with a short presentation by the Design Singapore Council representatives, Mahendran and Zeth. Mahendran explained that the primary mission of Design Singapore is to offer Singaporeans with a better user experience that will improve the quality of day-to-day living. There seems to be an emphasis on retaining much of Singapore's cultural heritage and using natural materials and resources from the environment in design concepts. Also, designs must appeal to the intuition of Singaporeans so as to be user-friendly.

Design Singapore helps local enterprises in developing product knowledge, grants for strategic projects, offer solutions to design problems, organise trade international trade fairs and platforms for local designers to network with global players and offers scholarships to outstanding local design students. In short, Design Singapore is a catalyst for the local design industries to further their research and outreach and set up as an academy for design thinking and innovation.

In a way, I feel that Design Singapore carries the enormous responsibility of determining our taste and preference for products and ultimately, our lifestyle. I was in fact surprised that Bishan Park was carefully planned and supported by Design Singapore. A beautiful feature in my own estate that I took for granted wouldn't have materialised without the think-tank of various designers and architects and the intervention of Design Singapore Council.

While Singaporeans are generally exposed to global trends, we are somewhat still conditioned to function within the restrictions of our limited land space and natural resources. So while I envy New York for having Central Park in the heart of the city, I truly appreciate how our own designers and city planners managed to create vertical gardens in our local contemporary urban landscapes in buildings such as SOTA and Gardens by the Bay. Critics may call these un-natural and an abomination of nature, but I say, it is thinking out of the box and creation around constraints.

Vivian Loh’s presentation on

“Student Engagement: Collaborative Inquiry in the Classroom”

22 March 2015

1300 hrs

Vivian shared a paper she wrote on the above title and explained that her inquiry stems from her observation of her own lower secondary students whom she found challenging to engage during group discussions. I believe that her observation is not confined to just her students, but to students in other mainstream schools as well. Students need guidance to generate inquiry and to offer a focused response to activities such as art discussions and even critique sessions. Her paper proves that the role of the teacher is still pertinent to facilitate students’ independent inquiry as well as student-directed collaborations.

In her paper, Vivian rightly pointed out that at least 2 factors determine the conditions for an effective classroom discourse, the first being an environment that is conducive for conversations and dialogue to take place. Indeed, this is a pertinent condition that teachers carry the responsibility of overseeing and certainly, this goes beyond the physical and logistical considerations such as seating arrangements and making visual stimulus available in the form of artworks, charts and posters to generate inquiry. What is more important is to give careful regard to establishing a trusting relationship between the facilitators and students, as well as between students themselves. The fear of being ridiculed leading to apprehension in expressing thoughts and opinions should be eradicated. Activities that deliberately foster a deeper understanding about team members (including the teacher) should be facilitated to create opportunities for students to acknowledge and respect the opinions of others in the class before student-directed inquiry and collaboration could take place.

Secondly, there is a recommendation to provide sufficient time for students to speak as opposed to adopting a teacher-directed mode of instruction. I was glad that Vivian mentioned even though we should advocate a student-centred approach, a fair bit of teacher input in the form of instructions or scoping guiding questions for each task should still be facilitated by the teacher in class. This will reduce the tendency of any discussion being skewed outside of the lesson objectives.

Vivian’s presentation also provided a stimulus for the group to talk about other factors that may hinder collaborative inquiry in the classroom such as over-emphasis on examination results and teachers’ assumed ineffective facilitation of inquiry in the classroom. A few teachers attributed these to the lack of PD and middle managers’ expectations of the departments’ desired outcomes. But what was more interesting was that we realized the definition of the term ‘Collaboration’ may have been ‘creatively’ interpreted or misinterpreted in different schools by different teachers. While we agree that collaboration will indeed nurture positive values and fosters emerging 21CC, a superficial understanding of what it entails will not effectively lead to desired outcomes.

Visit to Young Audiences Charter School

23 March 2015

Background

YACS is a publically funded charter school opened to elementary level students from K-12 in the Jefferson parish of New Orleans. Students mainly come from the lower SES, at 85% poverty level and 75% of students in the school are eligible for free lunch.

At YACS, arts integration combines the arts with the learning of core academic subjects. The school believes that it supports educational achievement and improved student behaviour by giving children both a “springboard” and a “safety net” for learning. The arts allow students to be more engaged in education – focusing on each child’s abilities and interests to provide support in academic achievement. The arts also provide increased opportunities for parental involvement in school, a key component to education.

YACS provides a rigorous academic program with a strong focus on the Louisiana Comprehensive Curriculum and Common Core State Standards. These academic requirements will be integrated with the five art disciplines (Literary Arts, Music, Dance/Movement, Drama and Visual Art) to provide students with additional learning opportunities and multiple ways to understand academic content.

Observations/Learning Points from Visit to YACS

Facilitating Idea Generation, Reflection, Critical Thinking and Creativity

Through an Arts Integrated curriculum, the school believes that academic excellence can be achieved. What this means is that the entry point to every academic curriculum begins with an arts experience where students draw and utilize specific academic concepts to generate ideas for the creation of their creative works. For example, in a social studies class, students were tasked to create an architectural prototype for a building that will be situated in the French Quarter of New Orleans. A learning journey to investigate the area through photo documentation, interviews with the locals and studying the topographical features of the area became important references when students planned, designed and constructed their cardboard prototypes. Through the process of artistic creation, the objectives of the academic component, in this case for a social studies chapter on the local community, was delivered. This model is applied across levels, across academic subjects and across the arts disciplines. It involves rigorous planning and strong collaboration between faculty members and teaching artists to conceptualize the curriculum and scaffold students’ understanding and application of the academic knowledge in the creation of the artwork.

While the school presented high success rates in delivering learning objectives and enhancing students’ engagement, the group raises a few concerns:

Will the model be as effective for students at the middle and high school levels where more sophisticated concepts and deeper inquiry is demanded from the higher curriculum levels?
Will the students have difficulty adjusting to mainstream curriculum approaches when they leave YACS to attend middle and high schools in their educational journey?
Will the students be able to adapt to the standard state assessments for academic subjects that is void of the arts?

Creating opportunities for group collaboration.

In at least 2 classes, the group observed how the teachers and artists adopted the constructivist approach to facilitate their lessons. In a kindergarten Math lesson, Music was used as the vehicle to teach the concept of simple addition. Collectively, students counted and added beats played on a drum and used musical shakers to demonstrate their understanding and provide answers to simple addition problems through collaborative music making. In an elementary English language class, students contributed words that describe specific emotions that they were later invited to express into action, during a lesson on adjectives. In these two examples, the teachers consulted the class to collectively elicit examples to unpack an academic concept and then invited students to display their understanding through the art forms within the safe environment of their classroom. In effect, students actively make use of their art skills to own their learning of the academic content.

Creating a lively and visually inspiring arts learning environment.

While the school is publically funded, it faces a challenge in providing ample teaching and learning spaces within the grounds that was allocated to the institution by the government. The campus is situated in an old factory premise and the school administration made numerous initiatives to improve the tired physical facilities to enhance students’ learning experiences through their limited financial resources. The school successfully elicits the help of the community to renovate, refurbish the school building and is currently in the process of erecting an outdoor puppet theatre with the help of volunteers from the Jefferson parish community.

The school actively displays students’ works in the classrooms as well as in the hallways. Bodies of artworks are categorized according to the curriculum and faculty members make a distinct effort to paste ‘Gallery Sheets’ to accompany each body of work to explain to viewers;

Essential Questions that frames the lesson
state standards that has been achieved
creation processes students go through
the academic connection that was made for that lesson.

The approach is similar to the pedagogical exhibition that STAR advocates for its STAR Champions programme, but in YACS, the purpose is to inform parents of the curriculum that their children have been actively put through.

The artworks displayed in the classrooms and hallways were massive considering that the school premise is relatively small. The artworks are categorized according to the curriculum themes and are rarely framed. The levels of achievement based on students’ technical skills range from excellent to mediocre and these were readily accepted as display pieces around the school. This informs us of the institution’s inclusive position in celebrating the works of every child without the need to discriminate students with technical deficiencies. Each work is also labeled with the student’s name and class and the group felt that the practice is a great morale booster for every student.

Other Observations

For the curriculum to effectively run, the school actively employs teaching artists to work alongside the academic teachers. Meetings between artists and teachers are time-tabled once every 4 days where the discussion is solely for the purpose of lesson unit planning. Essential Questions were agreed upon and members determine how the lesson will meet national standards. The framework for planning is based on Create, Understand, Connect and Experience. When asked how the school bridge pedagogical understanding between the teaching artists and the academic teachers, the school leaders explained that the school provide school-wide PD sessions for both groups of teachers, for instance in design thinking concepts, so as to provide both the academic teachers and teaching artists a common fundamental pedagogical understanding as an entry point to plan the curriculum. Due to these initiatives, the group observed effective co-teaching moves in the classroom where the teacher and the artist effectively add-on to each other’s facilitation of the lesson.

The group felt that the instructional approach is novel as opportunities to directly apply the academic concepts are presented through the arts tasks. The approach deepens students’ understanding for academic concepts and allows them to glean a better understanding of how these are relevant to the real world. The group raises a few concerns:

This approach requires a substantial amount of time for teachers to

conceptualize and integrate different disciplines cohesively.

Will this approach necessarily improve students’ technical ability in the \

various art forms?

Will teachers and artists get to decide whom they want to work with and for

which academic discipline?

The duration for each project seems to be long drawn and the curriculum

may not guarantee content coverage required by the state (syllabus)

A strong relationship was observed between the school leader and the students and between the school leader and the teaching staff. Mr Dunbar is well-liked by the school community, apparent from the way students and staff would greet warmly him along the hallways and in the various rooms. His morning announcement over the PA system was positive and encouraging and spoken in an energetic and inspiring tone. He strongly feels ‘playtime’ should not be taken out of the school time table (apparent in what some of the local schools have done) as he believes that students need to contextualize their learning through play and interacting with other people. The group observed that during playtime, students were actively expressing themselves through synchronize dances, role play and sports. Students felt safe to express and interact comfortably in the presence of strangers.

Visit to Isidore

Newman School

24 March 2015

While the trip to YACS was an eye-opener for most of us, Isidore Newman School offers an all too familiar context of an art curriculum and department that most of us can relate to and my reflection will specifically relate to my observations from the visual art department.

We were warmly received by Victoria Calabrese, an elementary art teacher in the school who showed us around the school facilities and welcomed us to observe her art lessons. Through our conversations that she enlightened us about her approach to the school's art curriculum.

Facilitating Ideas Generation

Victoria actively advocates the use of sketchbooks as a repository of ideas, experimentation and exploration of materials/ medium for her students. While she kept the sketchbooks in the classroom, she ensures that students retrieve these books as a point of reference and also to jot down new discoveries during the course of the art lesson. She trained her students to document their observations and reflections as young as when they are 6 years old! The journals are usually accompanied by narratives about their daily lives. This led me to wonder if the primary school teachers in Singapore are effectively facilitating the use of visual journals for the primary students as it seems to be quite effective in helping even the younger students to generate ideas for their artworks.

While YACS adopts the arts integration approach to their curriculum, the art department in this school seems to be working in silo. Victoria however makes an effort to seek the interests and cooperation from other subject teachers for opportunities to plan interdisciplinary projects for her students. For instance, she collaborated with the Math teachers of the students’ grade level to design a module on Islamic art using knowledge of basic shapes they derived through the Math curriculum. Students created their resulting copper/aluminium relief artwork, drawing references from the Math and Art lessons they had gleaned earlier to generate ideas for their work.

Visually Stimulating Environment

A distinct effort is made by the art department to create a visually inspiring art learning environment throughout the school. Along the hallways and stairways leading up to the various homerooms were adorned with students’ artworks from the various levels. Teachers took great effort in framing or mounting these works which successfully uplifts the quality of each student’s contribution.

In the art room, we noticed that the purpose of the display is not solely to provide platforms for exhibition but also to provide students with a visual stimulus to generate artful ideas. For instance, the teacher used large tie-dye and other ethnic fabrics as drapes to hide storage spaces. There were some plants and mobiles that can be found in different corners of the classroom too.

The art room was divided into a few distinct spaces. A discussion and instruction space was created near the teacher’s desk where students gather and sit on a mat. Another part of the classroom were tables and chairs which I imagine, can be arranged in different permutations to facilitate individual and collaborative art-making experiences. Another part of the art room was dedicated to painting materials and a circular washing fountain. Storage spaces lined the periphery of the entire classroom and students’ artworks are displayed at various nooks. This compartmentalisation of the entire art room allows students to accustom themselves with certain routines. They know where to collect materials, to sit during art-making and discussions and to move purposefully and accordingly throughout their art lesson. It also helps the teacher with better classroom management when students’ movement is planned in a certain way. Of course, it helps that the class size is kept at fewer than 20 students!

Visit to New Orleans Creative Centre for the Arts (NOCCA)

25 March 2015

This institution reminds us most of SOTA in Singapore. A school to cater for high school students, the curriculum seems to focus at nurturing future artists from the visual, performing and culinary fields. The background of the school is as following:

The academic grade for entrance is a C average and students have to go through an audition/ portfolio interview. At any time of the year, students may leave the programme and should they wish to re-apply into the school again, they could re-audition for a place again.
Students are allowed to sign-up for a full time programme where they do academic studies in the morning and creative studies in the afternoon in the same school, or they could attend only the creative studies modules in the afternoon. Most students attend home schooling and report for their creative studies in the afternoon.
The school offers heavy subsidies with regard to course fees as they have strong partnerships with stakeholders who offer scholarships and study grants for needful students.
The school is endowed with well-equipped facilities, resources and trained facilitators. The premises used to be a warehouse and the designers capitalised on the untreated wooden beams and red-bricked walls to create large teaching and learning spaces for the students. The school has become the pride of the community and has gleaned tremendous support from the public in advocating the arts.

Key learning points from this visit:

I appreciated the school’s openness in providing multiple chances for students who dropped out from their programme to reapply through interviews/ auditions. I feel that sometimes, students need more time to decide on their specialised area and even to discover what they want to do in life. The school does not bound them to any form of ‘contract’. As long as they have the talent, the school will sign them in as long as they have the capacity to meet the demands.
Visual art students were allocated their own space (cubicle) in the studio to work on their art projects. They are given the opportunity to process their works like real artists do. Students take ownership of their own little space and respected each other’s work space by keeping the studio clean and organised.
Since this an arts school, the students do not seem to engage in interdisciplinary projects. The training is targeted at high levels of proficiency in specific disciplines that the rigour of the curriculum cannot accommodate integrated projects (Think Lasalle and NAFA). This is also why the institution employs practicing artists to run its programmes.

It is a pity that we could not observe an art lesson, but our conversation with Brian Hammel gave us a good context of the schools’ approaches in to its curriculum.

NAEA Conference Day 1

26 March 2015

Sharing his experiences as a teacher, Tim shared that he designed his classes to be open to students’ personal inquiry, where answers cannot be found at the back of the textbook. He also admitted that designers, whether they are in the architectural, fashion, interior designing, and other creative industries, actually have brains that are wired differently. He shared that he was trained in sculpture and has a fine arts degree but he soon realised that while fine artists get to call the shots in the creation process, designers had to work within the constraints of a client’s requirements, needs and usually involves longer reflection processes.

In an attempt to create meaningful lessons that provides opportunities for students to capitalise and hone their critical thinking skills, he ensures that his lessons fosters imagination and does not allow his students to make ‘boring’ work where the results are predictable. He also advocates that teachers/ mentors should not interfere with much of the technical processes involved in the creation of students’ works as that is the platform where self-discovery and learning should take place for the students themselves. Teachers/ mentors should instead, provide timely feedback, based on their own experiences but students should be allowed to process the information themselves and decide whether or not to act of the feedback.

Tim strongly believes that teachers have the profound responsibility to serve both ends of student profiles in a class and to raise the bar of students’ achievement levels. He advised teachers to think about elevating the lower cohort of students and to teach them for life. It is a huge responsibility that should inspire teachers to continue in their vocation.

It was an inspirational talk indeed, and while I agree for most parts of Tim Gunn’s presentation, I wonder if a fine artist’s processes of critical reflection are really any different from that of a designer’s. I see both as creators who work around constraints, be it in the form medium and material, external forces such as environmental challenges and the viewers’ or user’s experience. Both creators create to serve specific functions albeit not always with a tangible function. In any case, I appreciated his presentation and am humbled by his commitment in encouraging the next generation of artists and designers.

"TRANSFORMATIONAL LESSONS"

“Build an Art Gallery in the Moon”

The general session is followed by a visit to the exhibitors’ hall and our delegates were literally greeted by the sights and sounds of the local culture when a mini mardi gras parade greeted us at the hall entrance. What I found interesting about the exhibitor’s hall was that vendors were promoting their products via lesson plans. And some of these lesson plans are quite comprehensive which take into account big ideas and enduring understandings.

Next up was Dr Carroll’s joint presentation on Professional Designers in Designing a 6-12 Specialized Curriculum in Design. Basically, this was similar to what Dr Carroll presented when she came to Singapore last year when she presented her work on the conceptualisation of the Baltimore Design School. Some the key points presented were:

The school adopted a social design curriculum where experiences are formative and discovered through play, collaboration and overcoming constraints.
Technology is harnessed into the school culture and curriculum that it changes general standards
Wicked Problems are adopted as big ideas in the curriculum. E.g. issues such as poverty, littering, etc.
School adopts PQP
Assessments for reflection-in-action
Students were given relevant experiences (real world examples) as stimulus for discussion
Students seem to be able to make sound decisions when they experience something 1st hand.
Assessment is based on practice and processes of art-making. Not the end-product.
Teachers facilitate 1 on 1 guided conversations with students
Teachers are encouraged to acknowledge students’ predicament. To honour the students’ contribution and participation, create meaningful relationships so as to impart genuine care.
Teachers work around limited resources
To teach students to self-advocate and to possess good stewardship to take care of supplies.

The presentation was enlightening and personally, the best takeaway for me was knowing that effective facilitation of critical thinking has a direct correlation to improved students’ behaviour. The school found that through critical thinking students mature faster in their behaviour such that they were able to articulate cause and consequences for their actions. Students’ empathy also increases and they were able to make sound responsible decisions.

Professor Olivia Gude presented a session entitled Not Standardisation: Curriculum and Core Values in Next Generation Standards. As usual, OMG spoke like a speeding bullet and with the room darkened to almost 90%, I was frantically scrambling to type notes on my mobile device. In her customary paradoxical style, she became (for a while at least) the antithesis of the national STANDARDS. In a short summary, her presentation encompasses the following:

There should not be a standardised benchmark to assess students’ works. There should instead be over-arching anchor standards.
Enduring understanding is usually not enduring (due to ineffective facilitation)
Curriculum framework of create, present, respond, connect (to guess artist’s intent)
UbD should be approached with care as artists do not usually want to work backwards because they want to be surprised by the outcomes of their processes.
Apply big ideas about art and about culture instead so that students will be able to articulate key ideas in their enduring understanding.
Enduring understanding should allow people to get into what they are doing and experience a ‘newness’ of understanding.
Potential space: possible possibilities
Visual Culture translates to how visual shapes culture
EOA and POD are just samples of sensible words for visual descriptive. There are other words that should be explored and utilised as entry points to talk about art works, just as there are different ways to make art.
Too much opportunity is created for planning but not so much art-making. Does every art-making has to do with planning?
Co-develop rubrics with students
Morris Weitz (1956)

I especially like the idea that enduring understanding must provide students with a fresh perspective about something that they are already familiar with. The concept of experiencing a ‘newness in understanding’ would mean to re-look at a familiar concept (understanding) with fresh eyes for renewed experience.

Another take away for me is the fact that we do sometimes allocate too much time for students to plan such that there wasn’t enough time for students to effectively explore their material and engage in reflection-in-action processes. This is usually the case in schools where students remain in the preparatory stage of their coursework for too long that they tend to start the art-making in the 3rd term of the semester.

After a short lunch break, I attended a session on facilitating inquiry entitled “Designing Curriculum for Engaging Students in Art-Based Discussion and Questioning”. I am not particularly impressed with the presentation by Karen Rosner. I actually felt that what Seow Ai Wee and Terry Barrett shared with regard to developing students’ inquiry are more effective. One particular advice which I had a problem with was to select an artwork that the teacher likes as opposed to choosing an artwork that fits into the theme that is being discussed and the students’ interest and artistic and language development.

The last session for the day was a sharing by Delane Ingalls Vanada entitled “Inquiry-Driven Learning: Design Thinking Processes in Visual Art”. Delane observed that there seems to be a lot of focus on creativity and innovation in schools, but very little on criticality. She suggested the following equation:

Successful Intelligence = Balanced thinking + Dispositions

Delane strongly believes that inquiry creates more motivated students and that teachers should focus on developing dispositions and mind-sets in the areas of:

Managing ambiguity
Perseverance
Willingness to take risks to grow and learn (Refer to Carol Dweck on developing a growth mindset)

For her papers: http://uncc.academia.edu/DelaneVanada

NAEA Conference Day 2

27 March 2015

Spirits and anticipation were high this morning as our delegates make their way to the Ernest Morial Convention Centre. For most of us, it was our first experience at an international conference and we were wowed by the large turn-out! Our first stop was the bookshop and we spent some time to purchase some of the NAEA publications before proceeding to the much awaited first general session with the fashion guru and mentor, Tim Gunn.

Ready, Set, Design: Bringing

Design Into the Art Classroom

Speaker: Tim Gunn

Not Standardization: Curriculum

and Core Values in Next

Generation Standards

Speaker: Olivia Gude

Critical Making – Making the Future

Speaker: Rosanne Somerson

President, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)

Somerson shared how RISD advocates a culture of ‘critical making’ which will lead to innovation via the following steps:

Frame critical questions through an iterative process
Apply hands-on, embodied approaches to problems
Enhance seeing through closer looking
Meet uncertainty with flexibility
Evaluate and articulate the significance of one's work
Generate ethical responses to global needs

She summarizes why critical making nurtures innovations for the future:

Making is a cognitive development
Making is a form of Literacy (Language of possible processes)
Making as a tool for developmental thinking (Iteration)
Making as an outcome of disciplinary expertise (Making is already on our DnA)
Making as a networked identity (CoP)

There is a gray line between Design and Art, and this line is being blured as the boundaries close in.

IN RISD, students’ rendering skill may not be as important as their thoughts about how their work could impact the world.

Next up was Curriculum Slam opened by Olivia Gude. She summarizes what the next few presenters would be presenting by scoping the following areas:

Principles of Possibilities, Make Meaning and Investigate
Play, forming self, investigating community themes
Encountering others, attentive living, designing lives
Empowered experience, empowered making
Deconstructing culture
Reconstruct social spaces
Elaborating fantasies
Believing

Each of the speakers thereafter presented their best practices to the audiences. The first to follow-up on Prof Gude’s speech was Nick Hostert who presented how Aurasma Studio (free app) has enabled his students to create videos that allow them to seek and understanding of bigger ideas. What’s interesting about his sharing was that he conducted his critique and feedback session online via other available apps.

Steve Ciampaglia from University of Illinois, shared how he engaged his students through Minecraft and Flappy Bird to design 8-bit games using SCRATCH (free app). I like that he scaffolded his lesson by using familiar and simple materials first such as grid-papers and one flat colour, before going into the more sophisticated softwares like SCRATCH. The good thing about SCRATCH is also that templates are available for beginners.

Ann Gerondalis and her colleagues in her speech entitled ‘Acting Out’, shared that documentation is an important part of an artistic process. This will allow one to look at objects and situations in multiple contexts and then to sort and re-sort in different ways. She also spoke about the value of teacher-artists partnerships where teachers should use artists as a resource and to engage in collaborations in the classrooms. She shared a project in which she was involved in, whereby artists from different disciplines created their works based on their responses to and extending ideas from students’ works.

Jake Myers presented his video project with middle and high school students entitled ‘Getting Good @ Being Bad’. Using advertisements as a means to scope his task, students were invited to delve into big ideas via satirical video projects presented as an advertisement. The advertisements gave students a sense of ‘agency’ and jostled people out of a consumer slumber (shock treatment). Students used bizarre content to exaggerate the idea of a ‘bad ad’ and used parodies to impart their messages very strongly. Students were allowed to be ‘weird’ and they seem to feel good about it.

I thought that it was clever of the teacher to engage students through a satirical project. What I noticed however, is that the technical rendering of the video is mediocre for that level of student grop. Having said that, there was indeed a high level of engagement and visible students’ interest portrayed in the presentation. Students showed that they have grasped the big ideas that the teacher introduced.

Madeline Stern presented her speech on The lunch Party. Her presentation captured my attention because I used to work on a project entitled The Lunch Party with a group of students from CHIJ too. In her project, students were referred to Judy Chicago’s artwork as a form of social commentary. I was impressed that at grade 4 her students were able to engage in a profound conversation about culture and comment on social differences. This was facilitated through guided worksheets and prompts and the conversation concluded with a class consensus. Students engaged in an edible sculpture project for a block party.

Kate Thomas presented how her students engaged in performance art as a medium to express their sentiments and as a form of expression. She introduced the class to Teh Ching Hsieh’s artworks where the class discussed how to test the limits of the body through gestures of failure, gestures of nervousness and gestures of success. In one activity for instance, students were blindfolded to sensitise and heighten their experiences. The teacher approached the lesson by eliciting students’ memories of specific events.

I find this a little difficult to facilitate as the final work is abstract in nature and less tangible. I do like the processes however, whereby students’ first hand experiences became the stimulus for the art-making component.

Rachel Valsing shared her project entitled ‘Unrules, Breaking Rules’. I like her presentation because it forces me to take a different perspective at pre-determined rules. For instance, as teachers, we tend to list some rules in composition such as ‘keep to the 2/3 rule’, ‘do not leave any empty spaces’, etc. According to Rachel, these kept teachers and students in the rut. She encouraged teachers to think about which rules can be broken, instead of following strictly to these rules. She asked whether observation drawing should be an end point. Could an unfinished work, a temporary space etc, be a completed artwork? Can teachers take more risks and use existing building spaces to make a commentary? She claimed that these processes may sometimes be better that the product and nurture students’ agency and gives more voice to students.

Professor Gude came on again to close the session with the following reminders:

Curriculum is not a set. It must be opened because contemporary live is never a set.
Contemporary art must allow students to reach out to the world.
Comprehensive means ‘coverage’. What teachers should do is to teach enough so that students can position themselves to relate to the world.
Encourage students to engage in personal research agendas.
Provide opportunities for enjoying, messing with medium and experiencing contemporary cultures.
Bricolage – be a curriculum bricoler.
Enduring understanding is very important.
Try something new. If you’re worried, it is good! Pick your worst class and draw them into the class with something they are interested in.