Saturday, June 9, 2012
Read & Reflect Week 1: BLOG BRIEFLY: Walker Chapt’s 1, 2, & 3
I did not learn to teach this way, with Big Ideas that is. So this was new to me. I really like it. Though while reading page 1 alone I was thinking, "this is above where most of my students are". My reason for thinking that is that my students have no art education experience before that get to high school. So no elementary or middle school art for my kids, which drives me insane but that's where we are. So especially in Art I there are times when it is simply the crafting of a product. That's not always the case and its not the case in the advanced classes. I like the idea of Big Ideas and I would love to be able to teach this way all the time but I'm not sure that my students are ready. I couldn't agree more with the notion of the Big Idea needing to be personal to the students. This doesn't sound easy but I have no doubt that it is important. And of course students need a knowledge base for artmaking. I am doing the things they are talking about in Ch.3 so that makes me feel a little better.
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This is a topic I would love to explore because it happens more often than we art educators would like; students who arrive at the high school level with no prior formal art education. And you are correct that we must meet them where they are. I know teaching with Big Ideas to these novices is totally possible, though it means a paradigm shift and ignoring the kind of art education we experienced ourselves. (My own K-12 art experience wasn't much better. In elementary, we got art once per month and alternate months were called "Art Appreciation" - a.k.a. carrying our chairs into the gym and watching 30 minutes of a narrated slide show of works by the great European masters. Clearly NOT VTS!! Fortunately, my parents encouraged art viewing and making at home, so by Jr. High and High School, I knew enough about art to know I wanted to know more. The rest is history.) I also know that limited time and out-moded district curricula make designing Big Ideas curriculum challenging for teachers and the thought of starting from scratch is paralyzing. Just take it slowly and one unit at a time. You'll get Big Idea instruction in future classes with Kathy and if you just design one unit each time, you'll have a full year currciulum before you know it. It will pay dividends in terms of student engagement, student learning and last but not least, art works that will be so conceptually rich, you won't be able to stand it!! Keep the faith!
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