Week 15: Final Project----VTS Unit PLan

Week 14

Reflect on Gnezda.  How does the article contribute to your understanding of your students’ VS & artmaking performance during your VTS Unit?

“Creativity is a specialized type of high level thinking, an emotional journey, a work process, and a high-quality human experience.” I am very glad that, in VTS discussion, I can see my students are developing a creative mind. “Association—making connections between disparate ideas—is often cited as the primary mental operation of creative thinking.” In VTS, my students sometimes start with listing some items they have seen separately. Then I keep asking: “what’s going on here?” They begin to connect things together to make some interesting narratives. After a few months training, they tend to see the “big pictures”.

In the artmaking process, Gnezda give me some ideas. “Lessons can be designed to engage students in their own ideation processes and experience their own inspirations. Open-ended assignments based on themes, problems, or personal experience work well.” I think it is a great idea to design my VTS based on a big ideas. When we do VTS, we can explore a lot of artworks based on my big idea memory. In this way, students will find a way they like to express their own memory. It will help them to do less hard and frustrating task because they are interested in it. For the critique part, I tend to let them to do self-reflection first and use VTS to critique others’ artworks as well. Criteria for evaluation will focus on how well the meaning is communicated, the student’s perseverance through the process, and his or her skill development.

During the creative artmaking process, it is common that some students will be frustrated and even doubt themselves. One way to relief this as Gnezda mentioned is “staying in contact with each of them every day, perceiving what each needs, tailoring instruction to specific students and their projects, and providing encouragement s they process through the stages of their full creative processes.” 

Week 13

ü BLOG BRIEFLY about the Popovich article through a VTS lens. What resonated with you?

As Popvich said: “Interdisciplinary integration is a student-centered pedagogical approach to education that helps students understand concepts and ideas across multiple-discipline.” I think VTS totally support the idea interdisciplinary. In VTS discussion, teachers provide opportunities for students to let them explore the meaning of images by their own, rather than provide the information directly. It is a kind of student-centered curriculum. VTS could also satisfy phenomenology required by contemporary art curriculum in which deals with consciousness, thought, and experience. As Eisner advocates a curricular structure that encourages multiple forms of representation in the construction of meaning, VTS also supports multiple perspectives in the meaning making process. It certainly not only enables students to reflect their perspectives, thoughts and experiences in order to understand concepts which are frequently ambiguous and abstract but also helps them to personalize and give shape to meanings. Interaction with participants also provides an opportunity for students to develop one’s perspective and to make deeper meanings.

ü POST your Image #5 on your blog

Critically reflect on Image #5 that you have just presented to your students
· Reflecting on Yenawine, was this image an appropriate choice for your students?

Yes, this image contains human figures and animals that my students are familiar with. They can surely make stories according to this. And this image is actually a photo of sculpture. It will let them to know more about 3-demention artwork.

· Did this image motivate rigorous & engaging discussion for students?

Yes, they are very in this image because of the emotion on human figures’ face and the movement. They also noticed the small gaps on the sculpture and inferred that it was from ancient. We had a great discussion about this image.

· Did students transfer non-art content learning/understanding into the discussion? If so, give examples.

Yes, this image is easily to transfer to a non-art class. Since the story “The Laocoon and his Sons” is very famous in the history, we could talk about the original story and the culture of Greek. It will be certainly a great image to begin the introduction of the history of Greek. And for the literature class, we could also talk about why the artist chose to describe this particular moment.


ü EVALUATE Image #5 and the VTS discussion:
· Would you use this image again to integrate non-art learning into the classroom?
Sure. As I mentioned above, the image can be easily integrate with history and literature.

Week 12

ü Reflect on the contrasting articles written by Winner & Hetland and Burchenal et al.

· Which perspective do you find most persuasive?

· How does it support your own beliefs about the role/strengths of art education?

I think “Art for Our Sake” by Winner and Hetland is more persuasive to me. However, the second article is not totally contradictory to the first one. But I really love the statement that “As schools cut time for the arts, they may be losing their ability to produce not just the artistic creators of the future, but innovative leaders who improve the world they inherit. And by continuing to focus on the arts' dubious links to improved test scores, arts advocates are losing their most powerful weapon: a real grasp of what arts bring to education.”

“Why Do We Teach Arts in the Schools?” support the idea that art education can truly develop students’ ability such as math and writing that can help to make them get higher scores in tests. They used the VTS as an example. However, I agree with what Winner and Hetland said: “art program teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum—and that far from being irrelevant in a test-driven education system, art education is becoming even more important as standardized tests like the MCAS exert a narrowing influence over what schools teach.” Actually, VTS can do much more than improve the test scores. VTS can also teach students “studio habits of mind” according to Winner’s article. VTS is about observation, innovation through exploration, reflection and expression. So I think we should treat art education in both sides, but cannot only treat it merely a tool of improving the scores.

“For students living in a rapidly changing world, the arts teach vital modes of seeing, imagining, inventing, and thinking.” Art should be used to restore balance and depth to an education system increasingly skewed toward readily testable skills and information. The purpose of both articles is good: schools should not cut the time for art, every student deserve to receive art education.