Teacher's Diary

Source: http://calmthings.blogspot.com/2008/12/william-mccloskey-wrapped-oranges.html

Last Wednesday we did a class on lecture planning with Róisín. Walter and I designed a lecture for one of my classes, as part of a ten-week course I am teaching called ‘Art For All’, which is an introduction to painting.

This is what Walter and I came up with:

On talking and preparing to plan the lecture/teaching session:

Course: Art For All. (An introduction to painting)

Date: 15-03-2010

Time: 9.30 – 11.30

1. Name of lecture/teaching session you plan to deliver this term

Composition and layout for painting.

2. Why do you want to address this topic?

Two-dimensional spatial awareness is important for understanding and practicing painting. I wish to develop the students’ basic skills in composition and layout so that students can compose their own paintings.

3. What are the learning outcomes for your session?

Student able to understand the concept of foreground/midground/background for compositional purposes.

Student can apply basic compositional and layout skills to compose their own paintings.

4. What models of lecture design are appropriate to meet these outcomes?

Demonstration, problem-solving and practical. There is a real problem here; how to compose an image on a 2d surface by hand and eye.

Design of Lecture.

Before lecture begins:

The students’ visual awareness of paintings and images is a resource in the session toward the understanding of the concept of composition and will be helpful when they practice it.

Other resources are handouts of images of paintings.

Also, the week previous to the session, it is important to inform the students of the topic to be addressed the following week.

During lecture:

Introduction:

Teacher speaks, introduces lecture content and outlines learning outcomes of the session, students listen.

Body of session:

We look at examples of composition together, students look.

Teacher explains concept, students listen and look at examples.

Introduce some light paired activity to explore the concept, students explore together.

Review paired activity quickly, students explain to each other and to teacher.

Teacher introduces solo practical exercise, student practice.

Teacher does one-to-one conversation as each student works.

Three modes of learning interactions are present in this session: student-student; student-teacher; student-material.

Conclusion:

Peer feedback and critique by looking at each others’ work and organic conversation about it…  (this could include a quick review by the teacher asking the students to outline the main points that they should think about when trying to compose an image).

Introduce next week’s topic.

After lecture:

Teacher reviews how session went…

Philosophy of Learning and Teaching Statement
Áine Ivers

Do I have a teaching philosophy? Yes, I do. It is tied in with my discipline very much, it is tied in with the idea that art is culture, and everyone has a right to participate in culture, to access their creative ‘place’, that creative expression has the possibility to generate intelligent thought, conversation and dialogue, as well as giving people the option to be part of something through self-expression, through their experiences of art. So, for me, teaching is a way to make the world better, for me, for others and for the idea of society.  I see it as part of my art practice, tied in ethically with the need for art and culture to be available to all.

Good teaching for me, is the most successful creation of understanding. It must nurture and foster a space for creative thinking for the student and teacher both. On reading James Elkins’ “Why Art Cannot Be Taught”, I was struck by the statement in it that teaching is an “intention”. We all learn and teach through the experiences we have in our everyday lives. I remember watching my mother making dresses when I was a very young child, and learning through that, simply being there, watching. But my mother’s intention was to make a dress, and perhaps to mind me, rather than teach me something.  Teaching in this situation was incidental to the intention – yet it seemed almost inevitable. Learning and teaching happened in this situation, but they were not the primary intentions set out in the situation. Society has developed so that for human beings to function together in its complex systems, we have organised learning and teaching; we have made them our primary intentions in the education systems we inhabit.

Intentional teaching is good when the intentions of the students is to learn and the teacher to teach are met and succeed.  There may be hundreds of ways that such intentions can be put into action, and more than one may be effective in a given situation. Good teaching involves setting out and agreeing upon and intention with the students; this intention may be very ambitious; motivated by the need to pass exams; it may be philosophical, practical or experimental; it may be wandering and shifting or fixed and quite rigid. Good teaching for me involves the teacher keeping this intention in sight as the students grapple with the processes of learning, and to see the quality of this intention. Quite often my students may have an intention to paint a specific picture as best they can and grapple with the processes involved in doing so. As their teacher, who shares this intention, I would keep in my sight the potential for my student to paint a picture with qualities. Often for me these qualities would involve the student taking a creative step, trying out something experimental – it could be that I encourage the students to push their colour-mixing a step further than they feel is safe, or that I encourage them to try making lines and marks that are bolder, filled with decision, although they may or may not have the confidence to take a risk, for fear of failure. Should agreed intention be centred around the learning and teaching of pictorial composition, I would take responsibility for the quality by not only teaching compositional exercises but encouraging the students to voice opinions or analyse the composition of particular artwork of something that they are trying out, although some may not initially feel confident in voicing opinions or thoughts, or even feel that such an activity is related to the learning of composition. This to me is how intention may work best in learning and teaching: it is agreed between the teacher and students.  Good teaching may involve another element: the creation of a space of potential for both the teacher and student. While a student is primarily concerned with their own learning, I as teacher see a bigger picture and am concerned with the learning of all my students. So I see something bigger than the student sees, and that seems to me to be full of potential and possibility, the creation of knowledge. This is something that fills me with enthusiasm for teaching, which is something I believe to be vital to a healthy and creative learning and teaching environment. The creative potential of the students is a source of motivation for me as a teacher, and I see the creation and maintainence of a safe space in which students can take creative risks as a important element of the role of the teacher. While exam results are completely valid reasons for learning in the societal context I referred to at the start of this statement, the creation and development of knowledge can be a joy and a great thing for someone to experience. This may be tacit knowledge, skills, theory, information, proceedures, techniques. The shared creation and exploration of knowledge is for me a hugely enjoyable experience that I wish to facilitate my students  to experience as a process of learning. It is an experience not unrelated to artistic creation: both are imbued with qualities of exploration. I believe that a good teacher should facilitate students to share such experiences of knowledge. This is something that I often find difficult to do in my current teaching roles, and I look forward to focussing on finding ways to do this more effectively over this course.  I intend to nurture this in my teaching practice.

I define teaching and learning roles as symbiotic; the learner and the teacher can even be the same person: “I taught myself how to make paper sculpture”. The roles suggest that knowledge is created through dialogue – that there must be and exchange of some kind, especially in the case where the learner is an adult who has a fully developed ego, for learning to take place. When this process involves at least two people, the roles are similar to the idea of a facilitator and a participant, who agree on the fundamental ideals of mutual respect, complete lack of teaching  or learning through fear or disapproval. I believe that the environment set up by the teacher and student is as much of what is taught as the content of the teaching and learning: should fear be part of that environment, then fear will be part of what is taught and learned. The content that we wish to learn and teach must be embedded in the qualities that we know that learning and teaching will effect.  As an art teacher, I believe qualities of trust, creative exploration, sharing, and mutual respect are ones that are part of learning ‘how to paint’ as much as learning the technicalities of composition are.

Aine here. I am a teacher with the CIty of Dublin VEC, and I am currently studying the Postgraduate Diploma in Third Level Teaching and Learning at DIT in Dublin, Ireland.

Today we are setting up blogs to use throughout the course, to record things that we are interested in, in order to cultivate reflective processes in our teaching practices. We are required post at least 12 entries to this blog for this module, inorder to make it productive for ourselves.

I’m going to begin with the books I have been reading over the past few weeks.  I was reading “Why Art Cannot be Taught” by James Elkins over the past few weeks, which is an interesting overview of the state of third-level art teaching, and how it has been functioning. He focuses on studio tutoring, and a little bit about seminars, critques and tutorials.

I just began ” The Reflective Practitioner” by Schon (Arthur?, I can’t remember his first name at the moment).  It was written in the 80′s and already feels a bit dated on the first few pages…

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