Risk - Taking Lesson
Lesson overview
This lesson is a multi-faceted lesson which is includes a group sculpture, practice drawings, multimedia collage and various critique techniques.
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Students will be grouped in 4 to complete a found object still-life sculpture. Each group member will have a different role in the complete process. Groups and roles can be assigned. Students will each chose a different view of the sculpture and create thumbnail sketches. The final piece will be done with multimedia collage,. (demo video embedded).
This lesson wraps with practicing artist statements and silent critique skills.
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The focus of this lesson is for students to work together and create cohesive pieces out of new materials. Through several days they will learn to take risks in new materials as well as practicing their artists statement and critique technical skills.
learning Supports
group sculpture still-life
Groups of 4 will assemble a still-life sculpture complete their group and individual tasks. Including thumbnails.
multimedia collage
the students will be required to use both wet and dry media to create a representation of the sculptures likeness
artist statement
The artist statement mad lib is an easy way to help students brainstorm what a formal statement would look like!
silent critique
This silent, anonymous critique will help students work on artistic language and save them the embarrassment of public speaking
rationale
Learning objectives
1. Students will use a multitude of materials to learn to take risks in group tasks and selection of materials.
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2. students will work in groups in order to develop better relationships with their classmates and learn to fluidly work as a team.
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3. students will analyze the work of Laslo Antel and Lance Letscher to understand mixed media collage.
4. students create artist statements and participate in critiqueto better describe their own and other students art through artist statement and silent/anonymous critique skills.
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adaptations & Modifications
This lesson is extremely multi faceted and is designed to supports a variety of students needs. Though not explicitly stated, the group sculpture can have groups and roles chosen ahead of time in order to support students who may have trouble with certain tasks. Students with disabilities can also be given more time or a leniency in materials. The prompt of the project is to include both wet and dry media but, for example, if a student is semesitve to material - those guidelines can be stretched to perhaps include glue (for collage) as a wet media.
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Overall this lesson has many parts that students are given the opportunity to participate in and the structure of the lesson itself is very supportive to students with disabilities. The silent and anonymous critique and the mad-lib style of the artist statement is meant to harness creativity but it is also supportive of students who may not have the ability to complete the activity independently. The guided forms help all types of students better explain their own art and help them practice describing other peoples art.
Resources
Original School Arts Lesson here
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Davisarts.com School Arts Publication, Edition: April 2019 pg. 44-45
Article Authors: Laura Lester and Christiana Hamersveld.
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Fountain, H. L. (2014). History and Foundations. In Differentiated instruction in art (pp. 28-45). Worcester, MA: Davis Publications.
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Differentiated Instruction is a recently common practice. It's simple in its definition, Differentiated Instruction: a synthesis of what research has taught us are the ways students learn best and the best way to teach them. One of the early approaches is called the Constructivist Theory approached by John Dewey. He was one of the first to make the move from lecturing at students to actually involving them. This is the core of many lessons and classrooms today, especially art classrooms. Deweys call for "active participants" is one of the reasons that teachers create art lessons like this today. This lesson calls form deep investigation of a three dimensional space in which students are asked to both create the space and investigate it. Another study is the Zone of Proximal Development which is a brain-based theory which leads to research based teaching techniques such as scaffolding. Building up students knowledge is encouraging before they approach a larger project. For that reason, this lesson includes several breakdowns of process. There is the opportunity to test several different types of media before deciding on the best approach and there are a range of thumbnail opportunities that can give students the practice they need to be less intimidated by the final piece.
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Overall, the idea of Differentiated Instruction is to teach for every student to find the lesson engaging and educational. In art, the lessons are to involve students and be challenging without being frustrating. It all comes down to knowing your students are teaching for their specific needs.