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.”