Journal that started with a friend and a web site

Being that it is summer I am have the time to think a little more abstractly about things and I have been toying around conceptually with what I am doing here.  a friend of mine works in the online education field and linked me into his web sites.  I had a read through and drummed up some questions and ideas.  Below are my notes, below that is my response.

• What kind of certification do courses need to practically benefit students?
• What is important to students in the future in regards to thinking skills and technical skills?
• How does one engage students?
• The current system of education is outdated in places but it is such a system that it cannot be completely uprooted.
• Teach students skills that allow them to apply techniques to the required courses.
• Educational gaming.

The united states has the AP system which is designed to allow students complete college courses before they actually enter college.  That aside I am certain that every state has its course of study and and universities have their own standard requirements.  There is a push towards STEM which makes me a little sad because it further reinforces the idea that the arts are for flakes and rich people and is a totally superfluous endeavor.  On all these accounts I am in complete disagreement.  One doesn’t need to have the goal of being an artist in order to study art.  How many people learn to dance; swing, line latin, whatever in order to have fun and exercise?  How many people play baseball for fun, how many children and adults are playing catch in the back yard?  Is it because everyone is working towards a career as a big leaguer?  I suggest no.  By this same argument studying the arts doesn’t have to mean one wants to become an artist.  The arts can be used to to better understand oneself and how to better understand other people and the human condition.  A further support of this lies in a comment I heard a director make “A good film allows people to understand the point of view of the character” we all want to know what it is like to be a hero, or a cancer survivor or even a bad guy.  I am getting a little off topic here but to bring it back it is not these skills that are explicitly looked for in a high school or university education.

Think skills are the underlying methods by which we attain technical skills.  A science teacher friend of mine said “Teach the students how to ask a question, and they will learn the methods so that they can answer that question”.  Teaching art skills or really thinking skills will never directly pay off because it is difficult to test, and I am not entirely opposed to testing to be honest, it can be an effective sorting mechanism.  So what we need to teach students is effective thinking skills and show them how they can be applied to acquire or use the technical skills that make money.  To go on with the hackneyed axiom “The world is changing very quickly and the skills we teach students today may not be applicable tomorrow” but there is a lot of truth to it.  Definitely communicating and sharing is the direction things have been moving in the last ten years.  So my argument is that making connections is quite an important thinking skill to have.  when one sees an object or a technology or even thinks an idea, the mind should be looking for way aforementioned thing is connected to its environment and other things.  In my own teaching practices there are several units where connection between ideas is required.  A partner teacher of mine wrote a unit in which she requires students to look at one specific tradition in the visual arts and then connect it to one tradition from modernism on.  That kind of thought process can be executed in any discipline.

Educational gaming:  Although I do not know much about it, I believe this is one strong way to develop students’ minds through a medium they are already familiar with.  fortunately/unfortunately my parents never got hip to the video game concept and unlike many of my peers my gaming experience is limited to Atari and Nintendo.  But so many people engage in gaming and truthfully I am quite encouraged by the amount of art I see being put into gaming these days.  Games now have designers that create whole worlds and story lines and the world of gaming creates communities that ten years ago did not exist.  I’ve had a couple of silly ideas like online Cadaver Esquis and brainstorming and association.  A new thought I had sprung from the new google Artwork catalog.  My idea is to start communities where people curate their own exhibits.  Look to curators and gallerists to create challenges based on how they put exhibits together and then allow the players to fulfill those requirements.  In fact it does not even need to be limited to just visual arts.  For example take a concept and look for items from a variety of disciplines that highlight that concept.  

Well, I don’t know exactly how to end this entry because there wasn’t really a point to prove to begin with.  It’s a journal exercise of sorts from which I examined a web sight and recorded my thoughts.  Hopefully it drums ideas for those of you who took the time to read it.  As always I am open to your thoughts idea, questions and comments.

Too Much

Ah too much time has passed since I've written here but I have a good excuse. I am a teacher and we had reports to write, then it was Thanksgiving and now it is the build up to Christmas.  Sadly I do not have anything properly prepared although I have a few things in the works and I will preview these with a little follow up to something I started a few months back.

First, to add to sequential art.  It has been the second time around that I have asked the students to make a story map, then a story board then studio work of art telling a story.  The first project of this unit is complete and assessed and the students are now onto their second project.  What I have noticed is somewhat inconclusive.  First, out of thirty students only about five or six actually completed both a story map and a story board (although all but one completed one of these) so it is hard to read whether it helped them creatively or not.  Secondly, as teachers know, students come in all mental shapes and sizes and while some ideas are quite imaginative, it may be a naturally occurring thing rather than the opportunity to use a thinking exercise.  What I have noticed is that the student who did not make either story board or map had a very limited story, with only one scene change and no bodily change showed in the art's subject matter.  Also the story board (which most of the students completed) definitely has an effect on how well they designed their work and even when the story was simple, it came out well rendered and engaging.  One student even wants to have the story mounted on a record player so that one can sit and watch the story spin before one's eyes.  The students are now onto the film making aspect of the unit and results won't be in until just before the Christmas holiday.

Also I spent some time working with one of our Spanish teachers and we looked at different ways we use story telling in our classes.  She uses it to help students access information and display learning.  We both thought that this is an excellent opportunity to start collaborating because I am working on the art of the story, she is using the form of the story and our ICT department is discussing the tools.  What I really like about this is the change in education that is being indicated here.  We all inform each other how to work and what we work on, and students can employ methods which are relevant to contemporary society in their education.

As an addition to this I decided to take my own medicine and created several narrative for myself which I could then turn into art.  This has had several results.  I've created a couple of paintings where part of the narrative is told and it has given me new ideas for imagery.  Another result is that my graffiti is taking on a more engaging aspect.  as well as getting my tag up I've been using my character (an octopus) to interact with the surrounding environment.  I'll link in my art Tumblr, not a lot is up there but you can see some of it.

http://www.tumblr.com/blog/devinallenart

Something I have been preparing to write (actually I wrote the outline but have since misplaced it)  Is the idea of struggle and creativity.  As one possible technique of examination I looked at the impossible problem.  Derive a solution to an impossible problem.  I think back to the time when I devised a scheme to create an atmosphere on the moon.  I will save you the details here but it involves planting one flower in a jar and letting things go from there.  Not that I really think this is possible but it's fun to imagine and could set the stage for a good story, imagery and maybe even dance, possible design.  This is somewhat highlighted by an NPR story filed about a month ago concerning how Japanese and American students respond to work.  Even when given an impossible to solve mathematics problem the Japanese students stayed with it for the entire time given (one hour) and attempted to derive solutions from it.  Here's the story you can listen for yourself.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/12/164793058/struggle-for-smarts-how-eastern-and-western-cultures-tackle-learning

There is another exercise I am working on involving nouns, adjectives and verbs but it is less well formed so I won't write about it.  So that's it, if you are celebrating a holiday this month or next hope it goes well.  Like always I will celebrate Christmas and Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) because I like the idea of seeing family, eating too much and blowing things up.

Daniel Pink, Autobiography and a Little More

At school today (I'm a teacher) Daniel Pink came to give the keynote address.  I watched his TED previous to watching him speak and I was a bit turned off because he seemed to spout the same thing a lot of people talk about regarding the right brain and creativity and the need to change schools.  The first issue here - right brain - I find annoying because recent research that I have encountered says that the brain is dynamic, not just hemisphere and I feel this description is just simplifying the complex issue of teaching.  However, his keynote address made up for what I expected to be a mediocre performance.  What I appreciated most is the data he presented us with concerning what the science and technology industries are looking for in education and how the policy makers in education are defining the system.  I will allow you to review what he said, since he said it and the information is readily available and my point here is to expand upon it from my point of view.

If you have been following this blog for the last six months you will see that I am working at creating exercises that can be employed in any situation to allow one to develop new ideas.  This informal research started out to assist my art teaching, however, upon consideration I have determined that it is applicable in many situation and I just have not worked out the details.  In fact, part of the reason for me writing this blog is so that others can try some of these concepts out and see what results can be obtained.  In this respect I am a punk/communist/Buddhist e.g. no one owns a guitar chord or idea, this should be owned by all and try it for yourself to make the best out of it you can.  Some of the exercises I have written about in the past are brainstorming plus, writing from a point of view, motion as a creative thinking skill (this one is weak but kudos to Will Percy for turning me onto an article about a motion classroom that helps students think) and story mapping.

Last night I put my money where my mouth is so to speak by employing one of my techniques (mind you I did not invent these, they came about over the course of my experiences, some synthesized, some dreamed up and some just from conclusions I've drawn).  In an effort to make my own art work stronger I brainstormed two categories to make art about and ultimately would like to combine them.  The first autobiography the second what I fantasize or dream my life to be.  I forced myself to write non-stop for a given time period for each of these categories, even if I did get off topic, and then review the results.  What I found was some thoughts that pop up once and again but I never focus on and some ideas I think about have finally been put to paper.  From there I put titles at random on the top of sketch book pages and while I may have no visual vocabulary at present and am requiring of myself that I make two sketches of each title.  What has piqued me most is that I have a problem to solve and generally speaking it is a fun problem for me to solve.  Will it make my art stronger?  I hope so.  Something nice that did come of it was my affinity for art materials and then a collage from art supply flyers that will be a drawing or painting soon.

An implied charge in Daniel's address today was that it was up to us, the teachers, to figure out how to educate students to think creatively, holistically, recognize patterns and develop systems and things people need.  Hopefully this is what I am doing, at the very least, it is what I am attempting to do.  I am beginning to consider how this work can be made into a tangible and I am looking for people who would like to collaborate with me on this endeavor. My initial thought is to create tablet computer apps (I even have some hand-drawn interfaces for these) or to work with people in a variety of industries and have work sessions where we try out some of these exercises an see what results present themselves   If you yourself are interested or know someone who might also be, by all means get in touch and let's see what can become of it.  I am going to do something bold here, I will put both my phone number and email address. - 2167540879 - china.devin@gmail.com.  This is because I am not sure if you can get the info from my blog, but I hope it shows how sincere I am in this endeavor and how much I trust humans' good nature.  Waiting to hear from you

Brainstorming Plus - The Spiderchair Incident

Brainstorming is a good start but experience has taught me that it needs more steps to make it more effective.  This is particularly apt with middle school students who sometimes need more guidance when developing ideas.  For purposes of clarity I want to define brainstorming as writing words and phrases freely, without editing or even stopping.  I often tell the students they must write no matter what, even if it's nonsense, for a given amount of time.  I limit this to writing because words usually work in concepts.  Images are also good but I believe they are thinking in a different method and I treat that as another creative thinking exercise.

I have serval starting points.  The first is to allow the students to just have at it and see where their ideas take them.  The next is to give the students the unit question and/or significant concept to think about and again go at it.  While some students will naturally take to this the results I have seen in the classroom are as follows:  About fifty percent of the students get right to it and the other fifty percent are stymied and may write one or two things down but spend the rest of the time looking at their paper.  Of the writing fifty percent only about 25 percent will have something that is a good representative of their ideas and the other 25 percent get off task.  Not that getting off task is entirely bad, but in the classroom setting where the teacher is guiding the students to a goal centered around a certain topic, it is ultimately unproductive, but I reiterate, still valuable.

These observations have lead me to construct the 'plus' method.  Break the concept down into more simple themes and have the students brainstorm along a certain theme.  The brainstorm may deviate as work progresses but it makes the work categorical.  From here I may take another aspect of the concept and have them brainstorm along those lines as well. Or instead of brainstorming along another line of the concept, have them run the first brainstorm and use another aspect of the concept as a lens to view the brainstorm.  Perhaps my writing is not clear but it is far more straight forward when actually conducting the exercise.  I will illustrate with a couple of examples:

Concept: Artists can combine unlike ideas together in a work of art - credit to Richard Todd who wrote this concept.

The students will create two brainstorms they like in separate columns in their workbooks.  Then randomly draw links between these columns and see what ideas generate.  (This moves onto a different idea of concept association that I will discuss in another blog entry) As I mentioned earlier this stymies some students and others get quite off task.  In my opinion it is a little too broad for students.  So my remedy has been to give the students more guidelines.  For this particular unit (once again credit to Richard Todd for planting the seed of this unit) I give the students two concepts to brainstorm, one of my choosing - furniture and another of their own.  Here I encourage the students first to brainstorm nouns and then to pick some of the nouns they feel attracted to and brainstorm those further.  When the massive brainstorming is complete then it's time to combine the concepts.

Typical instructions may sound like this:

1. Open your books and on the next blank page write 'Furniture' then take two minutes and write as many different types of furniture you can think of.  Don't worry of you get off of the furniture idea just keep writing for the entire two minutes, even made-up words are ok.

2. Now go to the next page and for two minutes brainstorm as many nouns as you can.

3. Pick three nouns you find most interesting and brainstorm them on separate pages.

Now comes time for concept association, which is another exercise I will discuss in future blog entries.

Here is an alternative example:

Concept: Humans made tools to make life easier and they make objects attractive to improve quality of life.

1. Brainstorm objects for use.

2. Take three objects from your brainstorm and describe each object looking pretty.

Ok I am going to leave it here.  In reality, many of the exercises are not isolated and please keep in mind that after the ideas are generated there is still a lot of work to do.  Refining the idea, designing and executing.  The goal of these exercises is to access the idea.  There is still a lot of creativity involved but I have found getting the idea makes the next steps more successful and more fulfilling for the students and teachers.